Supply Planning Model for Remanufacturing System Based on Multi-Agent Technology

This paper discusses the supply planning problem for remanufacturing system, and the supply chain is composed of one manufacturer agent (MA), one supplier agent (SA), and one collector agent (CA), in which the recovery and the treatment of the used products are done by CA. Both MA and SA have two alternatives for supplying each production materials: either ordering the required parts to each supplier or to CA who provides the "as new" production materials dismantled or disassembled from used products. We proposed a general framework for this remanufacturing environment and a mathematical model to minimize the total operational cost of each chain partner and the whole supply chain. Finally we design a set of experimental data to validate the model and analyze the effects of recovery rate on the performance of the whole supply chain. The research result shows that used product recovery and remanufacturing process contributes to enhance the performance of the whole supply chain.