Maintenance, reliability and performance optimization for remanufacturing and sustainability

This research program proposes to investigate the maintenance, reliability and performance optimization issues for remanufactured, refreshed or second-hand items. Remanufacturing, the process of restoring used or end-of-life/end-of-use products to like-new conditions by disassembly, cleaning, repairing and replacing parts, and reassembly, has proven to be attractive economically and environmentally for both manufacturers and consumers. The viability of remanufacturing is heavily conditioned by the quantity and quality of the returned products. The condition and state of degradation of these returned products affect the reliability and yield rates of the components recovered by disassembly from these products. Using these parts in the remanufacturing process also requires upgrading activities and reconditioning that can increase the cost of the remanufactured second-hand products produced. Moreover, manufacturers tend to offer generous warranty coverage in order to attract consumers. The environmental and cost implications of all these logistics, production, sales and support decisions are high and therefore require the development of mathematical models to analyze these problems and inform remanufacturers and the consumer in their decision-making process.

The long-term goals of this research program are to develop a comprehensive and integrated framework of reliability, safety, quality and maintenance models and tools for decision making in the context of sustainable manufacturing and reverse logistics.

The short-term objectives to be addressed are to develop closed-loop supply chain models integrating disassembly, parts reliability and reconditioning factors to support efficient remanufacturing activities, develop mixing strategies of new and reconditioned parts to enable the remanufacturing of durable second-hand products, develop new maintenance, reliability improvement models and warranty models to optimize the performance of refreshed systems. The outcomes are expected to be the advancement of knowledge with the publication of the models to be developed, training of highly qualified graduate students and environmentally conscious engineers, and benefit the Canadian companies working in the areas of reverse logistics and remanufacturing.