A multi-criteria assessment of robotic disassembly to support recycling and recovery

Research Area:
Remanufacturing and Recycling

Year:
2019

Publication:
Resources, Conservation and Recycling

SMART Authors:
Shahin Rahimifard


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Use of robots in product disassembly is growing in popularity, mainly due to ever-increasing labour costs in both developed and developing countries. However, currently there are no approaches for assessing the trade-offs between environmental benefits, technological feasibility and economic viability of robotic disassembly. The work presented in this paper aims to justify the future application of robotic disassembly in products end-of-life management by assessing its sustainability through multiple factors (i.e. environmental, technological and economic performance). This paper proposes a framework for the multi-criteria assessment of robotic disassembly to support recycling and recovery, which consists of three main stages: analysis of recycling options, selection of assessment criteria, and evaluation of disassembly operations. A decision support tool has also been developed to compare the results from different recycling scenarios based on manual and automatic disassembly. A number of automotive electronic components have been used as case studies to illustrate the application of the framework and its associate decision support tool.

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