Bio - Ou Tang holds a full professorship in Production Economics since 2010 at Linköping University, Sweden, where he obtained a PhD in 2000. He served as associate editor and editor in the International Journal of Production Economics since 2008, and he is the past-president of the International Society for Inventory Research. Ou Tang’s principal research interest is in the field of operations and supply chain management, more specifically it includes inventory modelling, manufacturing planning and control systems, closed loop supply chain management, sustainable supply chains，supply chain risk management, and China related operations management issues. He has published about 100 scientific articles in international journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Computers and Operations Research, Omega, International Journal of Production Economics, Production and Operations Management, and others.

Ou Tang has extensive industrial experience with his research projects. As the principal investigator, he has audited and analyzed production and logistics systems, and proposed improvement suggestions in about 50 companies such as Volvo, Scania, Toyota, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Ericsson, Electrolux, IKEA，Sapa, SSAB, Stora Enso, Alfa lava, Atlas Copco, SKF, among others.

Abstract: Remanufacturing has emerged as an important research area due to the tendency of stricter environmental regulations in industry and the awakening to the economic attraction of recovering the products rather than the disposal alternative. This also requires developing manufacturing planning and control techniques to improve the performance of remanufacturing systems. In order to reassemble finished products, new components are required since the recovery rate of return components can never reach 100%. When making a disassembly and procurement decision, we then need to balance the inventory holding cost and stockout cost. In the meantime, the process lead time depends on which disassembly and procurement option that is chosen. In this paper, we study a system where remanufacturing is driven by customer orders. A disassembly order is always released first and then the disassembly result determines whether a purchasing order is needed. Our objective is to examine the process lead time, which can be used to determine the planned lead time in production planning and control of remanufacturing. We start with disassembling a single-component case and then extend the model to a two-component scenario. We also investigate how the disassembly yield influences the system performance. Results of this study are intended to be implemented in a real-world engine remanufacturing environment.

Keywords

Disassembly; Remanufacturing; Reverse logistics systems, Bimodal distribution; Minimum relative entropy method