The increasingly higher and stricter requirements from the environmental directives and the end-users have made it more and more important to design products with higher upgradability that availed the producers of the possibility to extend the product lifetime, improve recycling ratio and decrease manufacturing cost. However, the changes of the requirements are unpredictable, so two approaches are provided for the producers in this research. One is to design products with lowest upgrading cost for the most possibly adopted upgrading direction. Another is to design product with the lowest average upgrading cost for all possible upgrading directions. Here, cost is determined by the replacement ratio of components when the product is upgraded, which, in turn, is decided by the assembly method and the component assembly sequence. This paper proposes a design & assessment method by employing term-rewriting method to analyze assembly method and an agent-based method to analyze assembly sequence of components.
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