Integrating End-of-Life and Initial Profit Considerations in Product Life Cycle Design

Author(s):  
Yuan Zhao ◽  
Deborah Thurston

Growing concerns from customers and the government about product disposal highlight the necessity of improving product take-back systems to retain the embedded values in disposed products. Progress has been made towards minimizing the cost of the disassembly process. While some progress has been made in improving end-of-life (EOL) value through decision making in the early design stage, contradictive objectives make it difficult to simultaneously optimize initial sales profits and EOL value. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed to integrate end-of-life recovery value considerations with product design decisions. The improvement of component reuse value or recycling value is achieved by linking design decisions in the early design stage with end-of-life decisions in order to maximize total product value across the span of the life cycle. A matrix based representation that can group components into several end-of-life modules with similar end-of-life decisions is also presented. The results are discussed to compare different design alternatives to understand their influence on product lifecycle value. The proposed method is illustrated through an example involving cell phone product design decisions and end-of-life strategies.

2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Zhao ◽  
Deborah Thurston

Growing concerns from customers and the government about product disposal highlight the necessity of improving product take-back systems to retain the embedded values in disposed products. Progress has been made toward minimizing the cost of the end-of-life (EOL) processes. While some progress has been made in recovering end-of-life value through decision making in the early design stage, contradictive objectives make it difficult to simultaneously optimize initial sales profits and EOL value. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed to integrate end-of-life recovery value considerations with product design decisions. The improvement of component reuse value or recycling value is achieved by linking design decisions in the early design stage with end-of-life decisions in order to maximize total product value across the span of product life cycle. A matrix based representation that can group components into several end-of-life modules with the same end-of-life decisions is also presented. The results are discussed to compare different design alternatives to understand their influence on net present product lifecycle value. The original contribution here is the simultaneous consideration of profits from initial and returned product sales, resulting from consumer demand as a function of heterogeneous preferences for the product attribute set. In order to estimate consumer demand resulting from discrete choices made by individuals, a random coefficient, mixed logit model was employed. The proposed method is illustrated through a cell phone example of product design decisions and end-of-life strategies.


2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2/3) ◽  
pp. 96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haifeng Liu ◽  
Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan ◽  
Wee Keong Ng ◽  
Bin Song ◽  
Xiang Li

Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (12) ◽  
pp. 3469
Author(s):  
Ji Han ◽  
Pingfei Jiang ◽  
Peter R. N. Childs

Although products can contribute to ecosystems positively, they can cause negative environmental impacts throughout their life cycles, from obtaining raw material, production, and use, to end of life. It is reported that most negative environmental impacts are decided at early design phases, which suggests that the determination of product sustainability should be considered as early as possible, such as during the conceptual design stage, when it is still possible to modify the design concept. However, most of the existing concept evaluation methods or tools are focused on assessing the feasibility or creativity of the concepts generated, lacking the measurements of sustainability of concepts. The paper explores key factors related to sustainable design with regard to environmental impacts, and describes a set of objective measures of sustainable product design concept evaluation, namely, material, production, use, and end of life. The rationales of the four metrics are discussed, with corresponding measurements. A case study is conducted to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the metrics for evaluating product design concepts. The paper is the first study to explore the measurement of product design sustainability focusing on the conceptual design stage. It can be used as a guideline to measure the level of sustainability of product design concepts to support designers in developing sustainable products. Most significantly, it urges the considerations of sustainability design aspects at early design phases, and also provides a new research direction in concept evaluation regarding sustainability.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Toktam B. Tabrizi ◽  
Arianna Brambilla

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), developed over 30 years ago, has been helpful in addressing a growing concern about the direct and indirect environmental impact of buildings over their lifetime. However, lack of reliable, available, comparable and consistent information on the life cycle environmental performance of buildings makes it very difficult for architects and engineers to apply this method in the early stages of building design when the most important decisions in relation to a building’s environmental impact are made. The LCA quantification method with need of employing complex tools and an enormous amount of data is unfeasible for small or individual building projects. This study discusses the possibility of the development of a tool that allows building designers to more easily apply the logic of LCA at the early design stage. Minimising data requirements and identifying the most effective parameters that promise to make the most difference, are the key points of simplification method. The conventional LCA framework and knowledge-based system are employed through the simplification process. Results of previous LCA studies in Australia are used as the specific knowledge that enable the system to generate outputs based on the user’s inputs.Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), early design stage, most effective parameters, life cycle environmental performance


Author(s):  
Guanghsu A. Chang ◽  
Cheng-Chung Su ◽  
John W. Priest

Many conflicting issues exist between product design and manufacturing department. In the early design stage, designers often do not have enough expertise to successfully address all these issues. This results in a product design with a low level of assemblability and manufacturability. Hence, an intelligent decision support system is needed for early design stages to improve a design. This paper proposed a web-based intelligent decision support system, CBR-DFMA, connecting with a case base, database and knowledge base. Early experimental results indicate that potential design problems can be detected in advance, design expertise can be effectively disseminated and effective training is offered to designer by employing this system.


Author(s):  
Yuzo Hiroshige ◽  
Takayuki Nishi ◽  
Toshijiro Ohashi

Realization of successful recycling of end-of-life products greatly depends on, as well as environmentally conscious, whether the recycling process can be made economically feasible. We regard the ease of product recycling as indispensable in order to realize a feasible recycling process. In order to make products easier to recycle, it is necessary to take the ease of disassembly, processing and final treatment into consideration at the design stage. Therefore, an advanced evaluation method that can evaluate a product’s ease of recycling, with minimal prototyping and testing of the product is required at the early design stage. In answer to this, we have developed the Recyclability Evaluation Method (REM). In this paper, the theory of the method, procedure and the structure of the system are presented and a number of application examples are given.


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