Heuristic algorithms for minimising total recovery cost of end-of-life products under quality constraints

Recently, the optimisation of end-of-life (EOL) product recovery processes has been highlighted. At the inspection phase after disassembly, each part can have various recovery options such as reuse, reconditioning, remanufacturing, and disposal. Depending on the selected options of parts, the values of recovered products that are made by reassembling parts will be different. Hence, it is important to decide appropriate recovery options of parts at the treatment of EOL products, in order to maximise the values of recovered products. To this end, this study deals with a decision making problem to select the best recovery options of parts for minimising the total recovery cost of products under quality constraints. This problem is formulated with a mixed integer nonlinear programming model and heuristic search algorithms are proposed to resolve it. A case study for a turbocharger product is introduced with computational experiments of the proposed algorithms.