Evaluating end-of-life recovery profit by a simultaneous consideration of product design and recovery network design

Product recovery has become a field of rapidly growing interest for product manufacturers as a promising solution for product stewardship as well as for economic viability. Because product recovery is highly dependent on the way a product is designed, it should be considered in the design stage so that the product is designed to have high recovery potential. To make a product easy to recover, manufacturers first need to understand the links between product design and recovery profit and be able to evaluate which design is better than others and why. This study proposes a framework for analyzing how design differences affect product recovery and what architectural characteristics are desirable from the end-of-life perspective. For better design evaluation, an optimization-based model is developed, which considers product design and recovery network design simultaneously. For illustration, a comparative study with cell phone examples is presented. Three cell phone handset designs that share the same design concept but have different architectural characteristics are created, and the recovery potential of each design variant is evaluated under three different recovery scenarios. The results show that the framework can highlight preferred design alternatives and their design implications for the economic viability of end-of-life recovery.