A novel heuristic approach to determine compromise management for end-of-life electronic products

Abstract

The European Union directive of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment for recycling end-of-life (EOL) products has had a significant impact on global enterprises. Recent studies have shed light on optimization of the EOL process. In addition to identifying the most economical EOL process, identifying the EOL process with the smallest environmental load is equally important, and this is thus a bi-criteria optimization problem. This study attempts to optimize EOL processes for electronic products based on a three-stage heuristic approach, which simultaneously minimizes cost and environmental impact. The proposed heuristic approach then assesses the most common disassembly and recycling processes by using the characteristics of electronic product recycling. Next, the best process for this bi-criteria optimization problem is identified by using the compromise programming method. The empirical analysis is based on data for notebook, and the potential impact on best EOL processes when notebook adopt new product designs is also discussed.