Reconfiguration management of remanufactured products for responding to varied user needs

In the face of worsening environmental problems, the manufacturing industry is required to reduce resource consumption and environmental loads during product life cycles while responding to diversified user needs without cost increases. In this paper, we propose a reconfiguration method to remanufacture a variety of products using modules extracted from returned products of multiple generations for responding to varied user needs. With this method, we can maximize the sales amount of remanufactured products, which meet the performance requirements of each user group. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by applying it to photocopiers.