Integrated remanufacturing scheduling of disassembly, reprocessing and reassembly considering energy efficiency and stochasticity through group teaching optimization and simulation approaches

The energy crisis and environmental pollution are receiving increasing attention from governments and communities. This study researches energy-aware remanufacturing systems. Remanufacturing aims to reuse valuable resources from end-of-life products and produce as-new products. Since remanufacturing systems involve a series of disassembly, processing and assembly operations, remanufacturing schedule integrates disassembly, processing and assembly shops. A multi-objective scheduling of remanufacturing systems is proposed, considering workstation use, energy consumption and customer satisfaction simultaneously. A chance-constrained programming model is established to minimize makespan and energy consumption while satisfying total tardiness requirements. A hybrid method is developed, using group teaching optimization and a discrete event simulation system, which can seek and evaluate potentially favourable solutions. The approach is validated on a group of test instances using well-known methods. The results reveal that this method can find non-dominated solutions with well-converged and well-diversified performance, verifying its advantages in providing informed decisions for managers and engineers.