Product family design and recovery for lifecycle

Product family design via component sharing is a widely practiced approach for offering sufficient variety to the market in an economical way. Most of the previous research has focused on the benefits of product family in the design and manufacturing stages—early stages of product family lifecycle. This chapter highlights another important aspect of product family design—the impact of component sharing on product end-of-life management—by a quantitative model for evaluating product family design from an end-of-life perspective. The model identifies an optimal strategy for managing product take-back and end-of-life recovery by use of mixed integer programming, thereby assessing the product family design in terms of its profitability in end-of-life management. A design study of a smartphone family is presented, and the results show that the model can assess profitability of a family design and highlight preferred family design alternatives at various degrees of component sharing.