A new model for estimating End-of-Life disassembly effort during early stages of product design

Abstract

In this paper, a new model for estimating disassembly effort during early stages of product design is proposed. The model has been developed by integrating two well-known models in the field of product disassembly: Das et al. Disassembly Effort Index (DEI) model and Kroll and Hanft Disassembly Evaluation model. The first one is a multi-factor cost and effort model, which is widely used for determining disassembly effort in terms of a DEI score. This score is a representative of the total operating cost incurred in disassembling a product. The second model is commonly used for evaluating ease of disassembly, by assigning task difficulty scores to disassembly tasks. Data necessary for determining these scores are obtained from work-measurement analyses of standard disassembly tasks. The proposed model has been demonstrated by an estimation of disassembly effort for a CRT monitor disassembly process using the model and validated by benchmarking the results obtained using the proposed model against results from an existing model for a case study conducted on fifteen computer electronic products.