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Assessing product family design from an end-of-life perspective

Product family design via component sharing is a widely practiced approach for offering sufficient variety to the market in an economical way. When discussing product family design, most previous research has focused on its benefits in the design and manufacturing stages. This article highlights another important aspect of product family design: the impact of component sharing on end-of-life management. This article presents a quantitative model for assessing product family design from an end-of-life perspective. Using mixed integer programming, the developed model identifies an optimal strategy for managing product take-back and end-of-life recovery, thereby assessing the product family design in terms of its profitability in end-of-life management. Especially, the model incorporates increased component interchangeability by component sharing. A design study of a smart phone family is presented, as an illustration, and the results show that the model can assess profitability of a family design and highlight preferred family design alternatives.