A multiple lifecycle-based approach to sustainable product configuration design

Research on end-of-life (EoL) product recovery has focused on adopting reuse, remanufacturing, and/or recycling after product use. These product EoL strategies need to be considered early during product design in order to reduce the total lifecycle cost, minimize environmental impact, and enhance overall product sustainability. Considering the implementation of such EoL strategies across multiple lifecycles of a product will enable maximum recovery of the materials and embedded energy from previous lifecycle products for use in subsequent lifecycle products. Such practices can help companies increase global manufacturing competitiveness and promote corporate social responsibility for more sustainable economic growth. However, a multi-lifecycle based approach to product configuration design optimization, simultaneously considering conflicting objectives, has not been well addressed in previous studies. In this study, a multi-lifecycle based methodology is proposed to solve multi-objective product configuration design problems considering conflicting economic and environmental objectives. The methodology addresses issues across all the lifecycle stages, from extracting raw materials to product EoL recovery (i.e., pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use, and post-use), and the entire demand cycle. The multi-objective optimization problem can be solved by introducing a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II using which various product design solutions can be generated by considering the tradeoff between several objectives. The proposed methodology is implemented on an industrial case study for the configuration design of toner cartridges. The Pareto optimal solutions yield better economic and environmental performances compared to the performance of the base toner cartridge. The results show that following the multi-lifecycle based approach to implement EoL strategies (i.e., reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling) could provide over 20% savings in total lifecycle cost, total global warming potential, and total water use in comparison to the same product configuration made up with entirely new components.