A decision-making methodology for the cloud-based recycling service of smart products: a robot vacuum cleaner case study

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe smart product represents a new type of products, which contains software and hardware components. Many obsolete smart products are required to be recycled each year. In the developing countries, the inappropriate treatment of obsolete smart products contaminates the natural environment. This study aims to coordinate the abilities of social recycling organisations and improve the recovery rate of waste smart products. A framework of the recycling service for smart products is proposed based on the concept of cloud manufacturing. In the framework, a smart product ontology is designed to integrate the lifecycle data generated by the smart product. To decide the recycling choice of the components of smart products with the lifecycle data, a fuzzy-rule-based decision method is proposed. In cloud-based recycling service, the abilities of different recycling factories are virtualised as a pool of recycling resources. The virtualisation is achieved by the recycling resource ontology. In order to select optimal recycling resources and encapsulate the recycling service, a grey-relational-analysis-based method is proposed. A robot vacuum cleaner, which is a smart product, is adopted to demonstrate the proposed decision methods. The results show that the methods are effective for deciding the cloud-based recycling service for smart products.