ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses complete and nondestructive disassembly in the remanufacturing system. It focuses on the operational aspect of product recovery in the remanufacturing environment. The chapter deals with new analytical approaches toward evaluating and optimizing environment-conscious manufacturing systems with stochastic variability such as customer demand, recovery rate, and disposal rate using Markov model analysis. The system is formulated into an undiscounted Markov decision process (UMDP) to determine the optimal control policy that minimizes the expected average cost per period. The chapter shows the numerical results of controlling the remanufacturing system under various conditions. It also deals with the cost management problem of a remanufacturing system using design of experiments under stochastic variability. The chapter proposes a new analytical approach to evaluate the product recovery system with stochastic variability, such as demand, in the remanufacturing environment. It describes the remanufacturing system as the UMDP with consideration for product lifetime.
