A Multi-Criteria Model for Remanufacturing Elif Kongar Surendra M. Gupta Laboratory for Responsible Manufacturing 334 SN, Department of MIME Northeastern University 360 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115, U.S.A. (gupta@neu.edu) ABSTRACT In this paper, we present a preemptive integer goal programming approach to model the remanufacturing process to achieve various economical, physical and environmental goals. The model allows the decision-maker to determine and sort his/her goals according to their importance. A case example is presented to illustrate the use of the model. Keywords: Component Requirements Planning, Inventory, Goal Programming, Recycling, Remanufacturing, Reuse. 1. Introduction In recent years both manufacturers and consumers have become progressively aware of environmental deterioration caused by the lack of end-of-life (EOL) processing strategies. Shortened useful lives of various products result in an increasing rate of consumption of natural resources and careless disposal of hazardous materials. These negative consequences together with the diminishing number of landfills has become the reason for enacting regulations providing both incentives and restrictions by governments in many countries. As a result, companies have started to explore new ways to manufacture profitable, efficient and “green” products to address, among other things, the products' EOL processing. The most desired alternatives of the EOL products include reuse, remanufacturing and recycling. Disposal of products, components and/or subassemblies by landfilling or incineration is discouraged or minimized whenever possible [2]. In order to reuse, remanufacture or recycle an EOL product, it has to be disassembled first. Since disassembly is a complex, slow and labor intensive process, it tends to be very expensive. Thus, minimizing the costs related to disassembly is crucial for economic justification. The level of disassembly (partial or whole) depends on the demand of the parts and materials, the cost of disassembly, and the costs of alternative EOL processing, such as disposal or incineration. In this paper, we limit ourselves to partial and non-destructive disassembly in order to retrieve components and/or subassemblies, which will be utilized in remanufacturing of products. To this end, we present a preemptive integer goal programming approach for the disassembly-to-order process to achieve various economical, physical and environmental goals. 2. Literature Review Several authors have studied disassembly process planning and disassembly scheduling models. Gupta and Taleb [3] presented an algorithm for scheduling disassembly of discrete, well-defined product structures in response a certain demand for components. In their follow up papers, Taleb et al . [10] and Taleb and Gupta [9] improved the methodology to include components/materials commonality as well as the disassembly of multiple product structures. Recently, Veerakamolmal and Gupta [12], [13] proposed methodologies that provide solutions for component recovery planning. Lye et al . [7] proposed an algorithm to determine the minimum total servicing cost for a product network based on Floyd’s shortest path algorithm. Huang et al . [4] focused on disassembly sequence generation and proposed an artificial neural network based method for this process. Veerakamolmal et al . [11]