Comparative analysis of rework policies in multistage production system

As the quality and environmental problems become one of the most concerned issues of company, the rework policy needs to be efficiently designed and implemented to sustain the company's competitiveness. This paper examines three basic rework policies in multi-stage production systems and analyzes them in terms of costs of setup, production, inspection, and inventory. For analyzing the performance of the rework policies, we propose mathematical models which can compute total production cost and determine the optimal production batch size to minimize the total production cost. The rework policies are classified by the number and location of inspection stages. Using the mathematical models, we could analyze the performances of rework policies and suggest the optimal rework policy according to each manufacturing environment. The analyses show that the proposed model can be used to analytically evaluate and choose the rework policies.