A mathematical model for designing reconfigurable cellular hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems

Sustainability is increasingly becoming a decisive issue in many aspects of life. While sustainability appears to be a popular research area in general, one cannot observe much emphasis on research in design issues of sustainable manufacturing systems presently. In wake of this, this article presents a simultaneous investigation of reconfigurable cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) and hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems and proposes an integrated approach in design optimization, analysis, and process planning aspects as an attempt to address to a number of design issues for “sustainable manufacturing systems.” A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, which considers a classical cell formation problem in CMSs, bridged with a production planning problem, in hybrid manufacturing-remanufacturing systems, while addressing to “reconfiguration” issues for the CMS for different production periods, has been developed. Numerical examples are provided. A detailed discussion of a numerical example is presented to illustrate the proposed model.