Designing automotive products for remanufacturing from material selection perspective

Designing products for remanufacturing involves incorporating remanufacturing considerations into the various aspects of product design. The primary objective of this research is to make automotive components more remanufacturable by improving the materials selection process during the early design stage. To achieve this objective, a comprehensive list of criteria for material evaluation relevant to automotive remanufacturing has been developed and a multi-criteria decision-making technique, namely the Fuzzy Technique of ranking Preferences by Similarity to the Ideal Solution (Fuzzy TOPSIS) is adopted to evaluate the performance of the candidate materials based on the proposed criteria, which, to the authors' knowledge, is an area that has not been explored before. The applicability of the methodology developed in this research is demonstrated using two automotive case studies, namely, an engine block and an intake manifold and the results have demonstrated the impact of light duty materials on automotive remanufacturing. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.