Refurbishment and remanufacturing planning model for pre-owned consumer electronics

In this paper, we are interested in modelling and solving a flow and resource planning problem related to the trade-in, treatment and resale of pre-owned consumer electronic products. This problem is motivated and inspired by the flows and the processes of the company Recommerce Group, which mainly handles traded-in used smartphones in Europe, but also used tablets, smartwatches, game consoles, laptops, etc. Collected products must be directed to refurbishment centres. After having been recorded, cleaned, tested and reset, they may be refurbished, or remanufactured by a subcontractor. They may also remain in their initial state. Finally, they are sold on diversified channels. This problem can be generalised to other refurbishment and remanufacturing activities of used consumer electronic products. We first formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program and show its NP-hardness. In order to solve large size real-life instances, mixed-integer programming based heuristic approaches are proposed. Extensive computational experiments on realistic instances are conducted to show the advantages and the limits of the proposed approaches. Several managerial insights are investigated and analysed.