Optimal Remanufacturing Service Resource Allocation for Generalized Growth of Retired Mechanical Products: Maximizing Matching Efficiency

• Main Authors: Wang Lei, Zhao Hui, Liu Xiang, Zhang Zelin, Xia Xu-Hui, Steve Evans
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Remanufacturing service; generalized growth; service activities coupling analysis; service resource allocation; allocation optimization
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9456949/

Maximizing the residual value of retired products and reducing process consumption and resource waste are vital for Generalized Growth-oriented Remanufacturing Services (GGRMS). Under the GGRMS, the traditional product-oriented remanufacturing methods to be changed: the products in GGRMS should be divided into multiple parts for maximizing residual value of different parts. However, this increases the difficulty of resource matching for service activities. To improve the efficiency of resource matching, we first used rough-fuzzy number and structural entropy weighting method to perform a coupling analysis on all service activities in the generalized growth scheme set, and to merge redundant service activities. We then considered the interests of both the service providers and integrators and added flexible impact factors to establish a service resource optimization configuration model, and solved it with the Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II). Finally, we, using a retired manual gearbox an experiment, optimized the service resource allocation for its generalized growth scheme set. The experimental results shown that the overall matching efficiency was increased by 74.56% after merging redundant service activities, showing that the proposed method is suitable for the resource allocation of the generalized growth for complex single mechanical products, and can offer guidelines to the development of RMS.