Production planning with remanufacturing and back-ordering in a cooperative multi-factory environment

Remanufacturing has attracted a lot of attention as the best form of resource utilisation for used products and the important way of energy saving and emission reduction. In this article, a version of production planning problems with remanufacturing and back-ordering is discussed, in which there are multiple factories in a cooperative relationship to produce new products, or remanufactured ones, or both. And all products are transported to different demand sites, but back-ordering is allowable. For this planning problem, three different models are proposed. The first model is a basic model, the objective of which is to maximise the total profit of all factories without considering the individual profit of each factory. The second model introduces the individual profit constraints of each factory, so as to maximise the total profit on the basis of achieving the individual profit matching with the production scale of each factory. The third model allows a kind of appropriate compromise form between the total profit and the individual profit. Then, the solution approach for these models is designed based on self-adaptive genetic algorithm with population division (SAGA-PD). Finally, a numerical example is suggested to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed models and solution approach, and solution results of three models are compared and analysed.