The eco-architecture for optimal end-of-life strategy for complex products: an extension to hierarchical analysis

An end-of-life strategy is concerned with how to disassemble a product and what to do with each of the resulting disassembled parts. A sound understanding of the end-of-life strategy at the early design stage could improve the ease of disassembly and recycling in an efficient and effective manner. Therefore, the end-of-life decision making for environmental conscious design has become a great concern to product manufacturers. We introduce a novel concept of eco-architecture which represents a scheme by which the physical components are allocated to end-of-life modules. An end-of-life module is a physical chunk of connected components or a feasible subassembly which can be simultaneously processed by the same end-of-life option without further disassembly. In this paper, a method for analyzing the eco-architecture of a product at the configuration design stage is proposed. It produces an optimal eco-architecture under the given environmental regulations. To deal with the case of a complex product, the method is extended for analyzing hierarchical eco-architecture.