Abstract
Remanufacture offers significant economic and ecological advantages over other end-of-life options. The goal of this research is to enable estimation of cost due to replacement of parts in systems undergoing remanufacture.
In our previous work, a novel repairable-system reliability model that allows system modifications was developed to describe a population of systems undergoing remanufacture. In this paper, the reliability model is modified to accommodate population size changes during the replacement process. The effects of two types of disturbances to population size, pulse and continuous, on the replacement rate behavior are studied. Analysis of actual industrial data is presented as an example of population replacement under continuous disturbance. This example confirms that a simulation using the reliability model proposed in this paper yields an estimation for replacement rate with acceptable error bound.
