AN INTEGRATED DECISION-SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT FOR DFX AUDIT

Abstract

Environmental issues related to the life cycle of a product have forced companies, especially electronics companies, to adopt new strategies to stay competitive. Whereas until not so long ago environmental issues in manufacturing were considered, at best, as a cost overhead, today that perception has been radically altered. However, to address product life cycle issues, specific techniques and methods have to be understood and applied, for example, design for disassembly and artificial intelligence techniques. An integrated decision-support environment is proposed, incorporating some of these, to compute the cost/benefits of servicing, discarding or recycling an electronic pager. The pager was analyzed as, with an ever-increasing user-base, the social and political pressures for product “take-back” at the end of its useful life is expected to mount. The methodology entails first constructing a decision-tree of the disassembly sequence of the product, embodying the relevant material and disassembly costs. The decision to service, discard or recycle is reached based on a cost/benefit analysis of the alternative courses of action. If the alternatives are not clear-cut, or heuristic in nature, fuzzy logic is employed. The software tools, all visual, comprise Axon® Idea Processor, Decision Analysis by TreeAge (DATA™), and FuzzyTECH®.