Abstract: In view of the uncertainties of scheduling in remanufacturing systems, a critical chain based uncertain production scheduling method is proposed. Based on activity-on-node (AON) network, the parameters of remanufacturing systems scheduling are described, and the mathematical model is constructed, in which the objective function and the constraints are depicted. Then the model is solved by critical chain theory. The remanufacturing scheduling is regarded as an uncertain resource-constrained production scheduling, and the basic scheduling is obtained by using mean flow-time. Then the critical chain of the remanufacturing scheduling is determined by taking the reference scheduling as resource constraints of the AON network and considering the process constraints and the resource constraints. The final scheduling scheme is obtained by compressing the flow-time and setting buffers on the critical chain to deal with the uncertainties of the processes. The method is applied in the scheduling of a remanufacturing workshop to demonstrate the feasibility and the result is simulated by Crystal Ball software.

Key words: Critical chain, Production scheduling, Remanufacturing, Uncertainty