Agile and Autonomous Production Control for Remanufacturing

Abstract

Motivated by high ecological and economical potentials, remanufacturing is receiving increasing attention as a process that puts used products into an “as-good-as-new-or-better” condition. Here, many challenges occur, which are unseen in manufacturing, resulting from unknown conditions of used products. One example is the stochastic routing of the products through the remanufacturing system (RS), which makes a flexible material transport by e.g. automated guided vehicles (AGVs) necessary. This places special demands on the control of the RS. To handle these uncertainties a decentralized-hierarchical control architecture is presented. The scheduling of machines and AGVs is optimized simultaneously using Constraint Programming (CP). All the participants within the RS will be networked as a cyber-physical system and controlled by decentralized components. The approach is validated through simulation and the implementation in a model factory. Results show a 35.6% makespan reduction, short computing times and the ability to react adequately to unforeseen events.