Simulation-based optimization using multi-agent technology for efficient and flexible production planning and control in remanufacturing

Remanufacturing is a process for used products to make them “as good as new or better”. A remanufacturing system typically consists of the processes disassembly, cleaning, inspection, reconditioning reassembly and testing. Due to unknown condition of the used products many challenges occur which are special to the domain of remanufacturing and not know from manufacturing. The resulting stochastic routing of products and material in particular places special demands on the flexibility of the production planning and control (PPC) in remanufacturing systems. In order to enable stochastic routing, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are used, which also contributes to increasing the complexity of the PPC. Especially the simultaneous scheduling of machines and AGVs has to be addressed in order to enable an optimal remanufacturing process. This paper provides an overview about current research activities in the field of PPC in remanufacturing and scheduling approaches for AGVs. Furthermore, a promising approach to enable the required flexibility of the remanufacturing system and to control the dynamics contained therein is the use of a multi-agent technology. The proposed approach consists of an optimization of the PPC using a multi-agent based simulation. The multi agent-based simulation consists of intelligent agents that negotiate with each other in order to find an optimal solution and achieve high flexibility.