Production planning for companies with remanufacturing capability

While much work is in progress on developing environmentally benign products and processes, there has been little work to date on how recycling and remanufacturing may affect companies' operations management policies. In this paper we present linear programming models of production systems with remanufacturing capability. The models can be used to examine the effects of different cost structures on the long-term viability of remanufacturing operations,as well as short-term operations management issues. Work is in progress on applying these models to a telephone remanufacturing operation.