abstract
- © 2017 Elsevier B.V.This paper studies a remanufacturing facility with several types of incoming nonconforming products and different independent remanufacturing workstations. The workstations have limited capacities so that an outsourcing strategy can be practiced. Each workstation is modeled with an M/M/1/k queuing system considering k as a decision variable. Additionally, a binary decision variable is taken into account to determine the contracting strategy along with some decision variables for the prices of remanufactured products. Thus, a bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming is built to obtain optimal values of the decision variables. The first objective attempts to maximize the total profit and the second minimizes the average length of queuing at workstations. To solve the complex bi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem, the best out of six multi-objective decision-making (MODM) methods is selected in order to make the bi-objective optimization problem a single-objective one. Afterward, a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to find a near-optimum solution of the single-objective problem. Besides, all of the important parameters of the algorithm are calibrated using regression analysis. To validate the results obtained, the solutions of some test problems are compared to the ones obtained by the GAMS software. The applicability of the proposed model and the solution procedure are shown with an illustrative example.