A Robust Scheduling Framework for Re-Manufacturing Activities of Turbine Blades

Abstract

Refurbished products are gaining importance in many industrial sectors, specifically high-value products whose residual value is relevant and guarantee the economic viability of the re-manufacturing at an industrial level, e.g., turbine blades for power generation. In this paper, we address the robust scheduling scheme of re-manufacturing activities for turbine blades. Parts entering the process may have very different wear states or presence of defects. Thus, the repair process is affected by a significant degree of uncertainty. The paper investigates the uncertainties and discusses how they affect the scheduling performance of the re-manufacturing system. We then present a robust scheduling framework for the re-manufacturing scheduling strategies, policies, and methods. This framework is based on a wide variety of experimental and practical approaches in the re-manufacturing scheduling area, which will be a guideline for the planning and scheduling of re-manufacturing activities of turbine blades. A case study approach was adopted to examine how re-manufacturers design their scheduling strategies.

A branch-and-bound approach to minimise the value-at-risk of the makespan in a stochastic two-machine flow shop

“…In fact, in real manufacturing plants, small-/medium-size problems are extremely common. Furthermore, scheduling on long time horizons is often operated at an aggregate level (Kusiak 1989;Buxey 1989;Liu and Urgo 2022), i.e., considering the aggregation of groups of operations into a macro activity. Thus, providing the possibility to work with longer scheduling horizons while being limited in the number of jobs.…”

“…Production planning and control need to cope with the intrinsic uncertainty of real manufacturing environments (Aytug et al 2005), characterised by incomplete information, and unexpected events that may stem from a wide range of sources, e.g., the duration of production activities could vary, new activities, like rush orders or reworks, could need to be executed with a higher priority, order cancellations, random machine breakdowns, and shortage of materials (Allahverdi and Aydilek 2010;Alfieri et al 2011). Special and relevant cases are remanufacturing processes that, differently from manufacturing ones, are characterised by considerable uncertainty due to the variable and unpredictable wear of used parts (Liu and Urgo 2022).…”

Advances in Sustainable and Digitalized Factories: Manufacturing, Measuring Technologies and Systems

“…Rodríguez-Padial et al [8] presented the assisted-driven design of customized maintenance plans for industrial plants. Liu and Urgo [9] showed the robust scheduling framework for re-manufacturing activities of turbine blades. Moshiri et al [10] presented an injection molding industrial case study for high-volume production in which the value chains for the production of additively and conventionally manufactured multi-cavity tool steel inserts are compared.…”

Advances in Sustainable and Digitalized Factories: Manufacturing, Measuring Technologies and Systems

“…Rodríguez-Padial et al [8] presented the assisted-driven design of customized maintenance plans for industrial plants. Liu and Urgo [9] showed the robust scheduling framework for re-manufacturing activities of turbine blades. Moshiri et al [10] presented an injection molding industrial case study for high-volume production in which the value chains for the production of additively and conventionally manufactured multi-cavity tool inserts are compared.…”