THESIS
2013
xii, 113 pages : illustrations ; 30 cm
Abstract
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 iss...[
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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.
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