A Decision Support Tool for Product Design for Remanufacturing

The decision to include remanufacturing as part of product life cycle should be made as early as possible, as many barriers that occur during the remanufacturing process can be mitigated through proper product design at an early stage. The main objective of this research is to develop a Design for Remanufacturing and Remanufacturability Assessment (DRRA) tool to be used at early product definition stage. The design support tool will adopt the Fuzzy TOPSIS method to facilitate product design for remanufacturing from four major design perspectives, namely material selection, material joining methods, structure design and surface coating methods. Simplified Life Cycle Analysis methods have also been incorporated into the decision support tool to justify and improve the robustness of the design decision making. The utility of this tool is demonstrated using automotive parts design.