An Integrated Framework for supporting decision making during early design stages on end-of-life disassembly

Product life cycle (PLC) is a series of life cycle phases which a product will go through in its lifetime. There are several issues with the life cycle of a product when looked from the environmental impact perspective. These issues impact resource scarcity, cause adverse effects on the environment and loss of embodied energy as waste. Some of the potential solutions to these issues, as proposed in literature, are to carry out various End-of-Life (EoL) recovery processes on products including their recycling, reuse and remanufacturing. These EoL recovery processes help in reclaiming materials, components and sub-assemblies from used products and make them available for new products, or extend life of the products as a whole. In order to efficiently carry out these EoL recovery processes, a pre-requisite is disassembly. Disassembly processes are closely related to the design specifications of a product. Therefore, designers should incorporate disassembly considerations into a product during its early design stage itself in order to make disassembly of the product easier when it reaches the EoL phase. Therefore, the objective of the work reported in this paper is to support designers in evaluating some of the major factors influencing disassembly, both individually and together, so as to assess the trade-off among these in an integrated manner during early design stages of the product's life cycle, thereby helping designers compare and select alternative designs of a product that have better disassembly potential at the EoL phase. An Integrated Framework has been developed to support designers in the above evaluation process. For practical application, the Framework has been implemented into a computer based tool called IdeAssemble, and the usefulness of the tool is tested with a design experiment. The results indicate that the tool supported designers in decision making on alternative designs better than when designers evaluated without the tool. IdeAssemble tool could be used as early as during the embodiment design stage of a product when information on materials, geometry, disassembly tools and types of disassembly task are available to the designer.