Development of an optimal method for remanufacturing process plan selection.

Remanufacturing represents an activity that often offers significant profit opportunities and can provide substantial environmental benefits. Process plan selection is one of the most important operational decisions in remanufacturing because it directly affects the success rate of remanufacturing as well as cost and quality. There is a need for a decision-making aid which can optimize process plan selection in the presence of wide-ranging alternatives. In response to this need, a decision method has been developed that combines the strengths of quality function deployment (QFD) and fuzzy linear regression. In this method, quality function deployment is employed to not only frame the problem but also to establish relationships between remanufacturing performance and process quality characteristics of interest. Fuzzy linear regression is used to determine the functional relationships between remanufacturing performance and process quality characteristics and obtain the optimal solution. If desired, the most suitable process plan alternative may be determined. To assess the usefulness and practicality of the proposed method, an illustrative example is given and the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]