A study of estimating remaining values of rechargeable batteries for closed-loop supply chains

Nowadays, manufacturing enterprises need to plan their strategies considering environment as well as economy. Therefore, closed-loop supply chains have been proposed. Closed-loop supply chains consist of forward supply chains and reverse supply chains in which remanufacturers reuse and recycle the used products. Previous studies proposed a method for remanufacturers to collect many products by estimating suitable product value at the collection time. This study proposes a method to collect appropriate rechargeable batteries by estimating remaining value at the collection time. The variation of internal resistance of batteries is calculated by using a function of the current internal resistance and the period of use. When we measure internal resistance values, they change depending on charging or discharging. Thus we propose a method to estimate internal resistance by using the least square method. We carry out the computational simulation of closed-loop supply chains to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.