A web-based information support for end-of-life product recovery

Start - Finish:

2000-2003

Research Conducted by:

A Rahimifard, S. Newman and S. Rahimifard

Keywords:

Sustainable development; Environmentally conscious manufacturing; End-of-life management; Product recovery; Information systems; Web applications

Industrial collaborators:

Supply Point Systems

Aims & Objectives:

• To generate a framework for understanding and modelling end-of-life product recovery

• To investigate a web-based information support for implementation of product recovery procedures as a part of manufacturing organisations

Brief Description

As a result of human activities and mass industrialisation over the last century, the natural environment has started to face serious problems such as global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain and natural resource depletion. There is an increasing demand by customers, suppliers and the public from manufacturing industries in general, to minimise any negative impact of their products and operations on the natural environment, i.e. being environmentally conscious. As a result, recent research in this area has led to the development of environmentally conscious manufacturing (ECM) concepts which include developing equipment, methods and procedures for manufacturing activities from conceptual design to final disposal (including reuse and recycling) such that the environmental standards and requirements are satisfied.

The end-of-life management and recovery of products is one of many domains in ECM research. This compasses technical, operational and logistic issues regarding handling the used products at the end of their useful life and recycling them with the aim of reducing or eliminating waste. The effective management of products at the end of their useful life will become more crucial in the future due to increasing number of national and international legislations and directives aimed at making take-back and recovery of used products obligatory for the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). In Europe, two major directives, namely the Waste from Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive and End of Life Vehicles (ELVs), are published and will be in effect in the near future.

The overall aim of this PhD research is to investigate the incorporation of product recovery activities within the manufacturing supply chain together with development of supporting information system. It has been highlighted in this research that there is a need for a systematic approach for enhancement of information, business and production management systems to deal with additional activities and processes related to the recovery of products. Thus, a novel systematic five-stage methodology, referred to as the ‘Product Recovery Implementation MEthodology (PRIME)' has been developed. This methodology aims to provide a step-wise approach for identification of business, technological, process, resources and information requirements for the adaptation of PR in different applications. Furthermore, the adoption of product recovery within any manufacturing application results in generation of a large amount of information, which must be efficiently stored, maintained and accessed by a number of different actors involved in various PR activities. This would require a distributed accessed information system. Thus, together with the recent advancements, web-based technologies are used as a suitable technological solution to the design of a distributed PR information network.

Publications

Rahimifard, A., Newman, S.T. and Rahimifard, S. , A methodology to support the implementation of product recovery, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Design for Manufacture and Sustainable Development , Liverpool, UK, 2002, p. 145-152.

Rahimifard, A., Newman, S.T. and Rahimifard, S. , Reference Configurations to Support the Implementation of the Product Recovery Supply Chain, Proceedings of the 5th IFIP International Conference on Information Technology for Balanced Automation Systems in Manufacturing and Service, Cancun, Mexico, 2002, p. 453-460.

Rahimifard, A., Newman, S.T. and Rahimifard, S ., A methodology to support the implementation of product recovery, selected conference paper to be published in the Journal of Engineering Manufacture: Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineering Part-B in 2004