Incorporating Quality Function Deployment with modularity for the end-of-life of a product family

In the past decades both product family design and eco-product design have been well studied. However, little research work has been done on the development of eco-product families. The aim of this research is to develop a design method for both eco-issues and product family issues. With regard to the eco-issues, only the End-of-life phase is considered, while for product family issues we focus on the product variety issues. Literature shows that Modularity and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) are effective methods for eco-design and product family design. The main idea is to incorporate QFD with modularity. The eco-modular drivers are obtained from the extended-QFD analysis and life cycle modules for eco-product family are identified with a fuzzy clustering method and eco-product family are established with DV (degree of variety) which is calculated by the QFD method. A case study demonstrates and validates our method and the results show that QFD can help designer determine better eco-modular drivers and improve modular method to create more variety considering End-of-life issues.