Quality management in product recovery using the Internet of Things: An optimization approach

Internet of Things, by reducing or almost eliminating uncertainty regarding existence, types, conditions and remaining lives of components in an end-of-life product (EOLP), can mitigate planning of remanufacturing operations. Remaining useful life can be taken into account as a good measure of quality. Therefore, immediate determination of remaining useful life allows optimal recovery decisions to guarantee a minimum quality level on recovered products while satisfying various system criteria. In this paper, a multiple objective advanced remanufacturing-to-order and disassembly-to-order (ARTODTO) system is proposed as an order-driven component and product recovery (ODCPR) system. In ARTODTO, device embedded products are remanufactured and disassembled to meet the product and component demands, recycled to satisfy the materials demands, stored to be re-used later, or disposed of. The objective of the system is to achieve multiple conflicting financial, environmental and quality-based goals. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer goal programming model that utilizes the Internet of Things. A numerical case example is considered to illustrate its implementation. (c) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.