Economic Assessment of Component Reuse in Design for Remanufacturing.

摘要

Solving environmental issues has posed a serious challenge to manufacturing industry. To this end, remanufacturing has been advocated as an important approach to achieve sustainable manufacturing by formulating a closed-loop product life cycle. End-of-life products are taken back from customers as feedstock in remanufacturing so that environmental issues regarding resources, energy, carbon dioxide emissions and waste disposal underlying manufacturing industry can be potentially resolved. The key to fully achieve benefits of remanufacturing lies in the efficient and cost-effective reuse of components from end-of-life products. However, major economic issues confronting remanufacturing management include reuse planning, component proliferation and component obsolescence. These issues need to be best addressed upfront during product design phase. This thesis aims to develop methodologies and analytical models based on design theory to assess the economic effect of component reuse for improving remanufacturing management. Firstly, a methodological framework based on modular design theory is developed for product end-of-life management. A decision tree approach is adopted for component reuse planning to maximize total value recovered. Secondly, a design for remanufacturing framework is constructed based on axiomatic design theory to integrate economic assessment of component reuse in remanufacturing supply chain into product family design methodology. The risk pooling effect of component commonality in product family architecture is modeled to measure economic benefits of component reuse in remanufacturing. Lastly, Remanufacturing diffusion models are developed based on the Bass model to quantify total component reuse availability considering time delay, loss in reverse logistics and reprocessing operations as well as component commonality across multiple product generations. Industrial studies and numerical analysis are conducted to demonstrate the applicability of our methodology and generate managerial insights. By systematically integrating economic assessment of component reuse in remanufacturing into product design, this method can help product designers make informed decisions for improving remanufacturing management.