Life design for remanufacturing durable products

When a remanufacturing system is put into practice it is critical to assure the quality of the remanufactured products and reusable parts used for remanufacturing durable products, in order to prevent defective remanufactured products from appearing in the consumer market. Thus, a part which is intended for reuse should be given more than two lives in the design phase. Therefore, it is important to conduct the life design appropriately for units intended for reuse. We propose a life-design method which can minimize the total environmental impact of a reuse-intended unit and determine an optimal design parameter vector of the unit. The life design is formulated as an optimization problem in which two types of failures of products: functional failure and physical failure, are considered. We show examples of the life design as well as analyze the sensibility of the design parameter vectors toward the environmental impacts