A Hybrid Meta-Heuristic Approach to Buffer Allocation in Remanufacturing Environment: A Case Study of Toner Cartridge Remanufacturing

buffer allocation problem (BAP) is an extremely substantial research subject in planning remanufacturing andmanufacturing systems. The problem is looking for the best-allocated buffer sizes into buffer locations to achievespecific objectives. Buffer design is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem and more complicated due to thenature of combinatorial optimization. We have modelled an unbalanced and unreliable remanufacturing system withfinite buffers to find (near)optimal buffer allocation using hybrid meta-heuristic algorithm. Several activities areconsidered in an independent remanufacturing system including collection of used products, transportation,disposition, disassembly, remanufacturing, reassembly and inspection. In this paper, open queuing network principalsand decomposition-expansion technique are applied to model the remanufacturing processes and analyse the systemperformance. A nonlinear mathematical programming model and a hybrid genetic-simulated annealing approach areused to seek for the (near)optimal buffer allocation. A case study (toner cartridge remanufacturing company) ispresented to analyse the buffer sizing effects on throughput rate. Analysis of the results showed that how the hybridalgorithm performance is robust and consistent representing excellent results in a diversity of conditions