Joint optimisation of maintenance and production policies with subcontracting and product returns

This paper, an extension of our previous research, deals with the problem of jointly optimizing maintenance, production and inventory costs considering subcontracting and product returns. The manufacturing system, which fails randomly, has to satisfy a random product demand during a finite planning horizon under a required service level. The portion of products returned by the customers that are still in saleable condition are collected in the principle store from which customer demand is filled, while the portion that are non-conformal are collected in a second store and then remanufactured by a subcontractor. This study is validated by a real industrial case presented in this paper.