A Case-Based Reasoning Method for Remanufacturing Process Planning

Remanufacturing is a practice of growing importance due to its increasing environmental and economic benefits. Process planning plays a critical role in realizing a successful remanufacturing strategy. This paper presents a case-based reasoning method for remanufacturing process planning, which allows a process planner to rapidly retrieve, reuse, revise, and retain the solutions to past process problems. In the proposed method, influence factors including essential characteristics, failure characteristics, and remanufacturing processing characteristics are identified, and the local similarity of influence factors between the new case and the past cases is determined by nearest neighbor matching method, and then the vector of correction factor for local similarity is utilized in the nearest neighbor algorithm to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of case searching. To assess the usefulness and practicality of the proposed method, an illustrative example is given and the results are discussed.