Assessing the Remanufacturability of Office Furiniture: A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach

While the average life cycle of consumer goods is continuously decreasing, the amount of used product at their end-of-life (EOL) is accumulating fast at and at the same pace. Most EOL products end up in landfills, and many of which are not biodegradable. These two challenges have necessitated renewed global interest in product EOL management strategies by manufacturers, third party companies, consumers and governments. Remanufacturing is one of the EOL strategies which is highly environmental-friendly. Additionally, remanufacturing is seen as one of the highly profitable re-use business strategies. The selling price of remanufactured products is usually about 50—80% of a new one, making remanufacturing a win—win solution, saving both money and preserving the environment as well as raising the bottom-line of enterprises. Through the literature review of remanufacturing, we realize many researchers in this area have focused on a few product categories such as automotive, electrical and electronic equipment as well as ink cartridge, thus accelerating innovations for the remanufacture of these product categories. There is therefore, a need to explore the remanufaturability of other products, especially the ones with high market potential growth as well as profit margin. Furniture industry is the one that fits the description and is the focus of this thesis. The goal of this exploratory research is to present the first framework of its kind that aims at assessing the remanufacturability of office furniture. The proposed evaluation model considers three aspects of the assessment problem: economic, social and environmental to obtain a holistic view of remanufacturability of office furniture. We apply the fuzzy TOPSIS methodology to deal with incomplete and often subjective information during the evaluation. Furthermore, we validate our evaluation model using published research data for a multi-criteria allocation decision making (MCDM) problem. Through the model validation, we show that the proposed evaluation model has the capability to solve MCDM problems. Lastly, a case study which involves three pieces of office furniture is used to illustrate the function of the proposed model

Intelligent systems in manufacturing: current developments and future prospects

Global competition and rapidly changing customer requirements are demanding increasing changes in manufacturing environments. Enterprises are required to constantly redesign their products and continuously reconfigure their manufacturing systems. Traditional approaches to manufacturing systems do not fully satisfy this new situation. Many authors have proposed that artificial intelligence will bring the flexibility and efficiency needed by manufacturing systems. This paper is a review of artificial intelligence techniques used in manufacturing systems. The paper first defines the components of a simplified intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS), the different Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to be considered and then shows how these AI techniques are used for the components of IMS

Barrier analysis approach in metal additive manufacturing implementation with environment consideration

Notwithstanding the developments in additive manufacturing technology have been set to overcome human limitations and improve efficiency in manual restoration activities, their widespread implementation as a disruptive production technology has brought various impacts on the environment, and the environmental assessment is limited in this regard. The Malaysian automotive industry has not seen widespread adoption of Life Cycle Assessment for additive manufacturing implementation. Based on the current literature review, there is a gap as the barriers for implementing Life Cycle Assessment in additive manufacturing technology within the Malaysian automotive manufacturing industry are not critically discussed. There is a need for developing appropriate approaches to weight and determine the interrelationships between these obstacles and the most prevalent ones in order to devise mitigation strategies for them. The purposes of this study are to identify various barriers of implementing Life Cycle Assessment in metal additive manufacturing within Malaysian automotive manufacturing industry and, secondly, to develop an approach to prioritize the barriers and recognize the most critical barriers. In this regard, the extant literature has critically reviewed the barriers of implementing Life Cycle Assessment in metal additive manufacturing within Malaysian automotive manufacturing industry. Fuzzy preference programming, as one of the newest and most accurate fuzzy modifications of the Analytical Hierarchy Process, was used to achieve the research purposes. Suitable Triangular Fuzzy Number has been defined and the selected data collection method was expert opinion. A total of eight industry experts from one company were involved in this research study to give their opinion on the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process pairwise comparison table. The expert opinions indicated that the main concern of industry is financial-related topic. The data collected have been analyzed using Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process calculations and confirmed by the consistency check. Following the results, dominant barriers were accordingly identified and ranked in each category as well as overall. According to the results from expert opinions, the highest-ranking barrier is lack of financial resources, followed by lack of Life Cycle Assessment expertise in the additive manufacturing context, and the third rank is the lack of laws and directives for Life Cycle Assessment application in additive manufacturing. The findings may be useful to managers to develop suitable mitigation strategies and make more informed decisions with individual focus, level focus, or cluster focus. It may also contribute to the additive manufacturing literature by the weighted presentation of the barriers to implementing Life Cycle Assessment in additive manufacturing within the Malaysian automotive manufacturing industry. This study will contribute to a framework of roadmaps and strategies for sound and environmentally friendly additive manufacturing implementation in Malaysian automotive industry

VIKOR Technique:A Systematic Review of the State of the Art Literature on Methodologies and Applications

The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of the VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method in several application areas such as sustainability and renewable energy. This study reviewed a total of 176 papers, published in 2004 to 2015, from 83 high-ranking journals; most of which were related to Operational Research, Management Sciences, decision making, sustainability and renewable energy and were extracted from the “Web of Science and Scopus” databases. Papers were classified into 15 main application areas. Furthermore, papers were categorized based on the nationalities of authors, dates of publications, techniques and methods, type of studies, the names of the journals and studies purposes. The results of this study indicated that more papers on VIKOR technique were published in 2013 than in any other year. In addition, 13 papers were published about sustainability and renewable energy fields. Furthermore, VIKOR and fuzzy VIKOR methods, had the first rank in use. Additionally, the Journal of Expert Systems with Applications was the most significant journal in this study, with 27 publications on the topic. Finally, Taiwan had the first rank from 22 nationalities which used VIKOR technique

Appropriate location for remanufacturing plant towards sustainable supply chain

© 2019 The Author(s). Confronted with the scarcity of natural resources, increase in product returns and government regulations on protection of environment, firms are implementing remanufacturing operations to achieve growth which is more sustainable and contribute to the millennium sustainable development goals. The challenge before the managers is to decide the appropriate location to establish the remanufacturing facilities in the reverse supply chain. Several conflicting criteria need to be considered before establishing a remanufacturing facility. In this paper, a framework is proposed to evaluate an ideal location for opening a remanufacturing plant, with the aid of ideal solution based multi criteria decision making (MCDM) tools, specifically TOPSIS, GRA and VIKOR. The suitable candidate location is then selected using the veto rule, which helps to overcome the limitation of using a single MCDM tool. An illustrative application in the Indian automotive sector is demonstrated to show the applicability of proposed framework. The approach is useful when there is a lack of quantitative data or the information is incomplete. The developed framework will help industries and economies to impact the use of eco-efficient and socio-economic systems and suggest pathways of transitioning to a more sustainable future

Investigating the ecological efficiency of widely utilized bio-sourced insulation materials in the building lifecycle

Because of rising pollutant emissions, potential global warming results, and rising energy demands, environmentally friendly and renewable building insulation materials are increasing in popularity. The changes in fossil-based energy resource prices, climate variation, and ecological menaces have resulted in important requisitions for bio-sourced and renewable materials, with building products accounting for an important volume. The building sector has important social, environmental, and financial effects. C-footprint of 15 insulating materials was investigated to compare the ecological efficiency of a building over its entire lifecycle. The values calculated were crosschecked with the thermal insulation’s real impact. The benchmark was made with the ecological effect evaluation rating by accounting for each material’s density and also variances in thermal conductivity degree. This research characterizes how to choose the most environment-friendly construction insulating material from the present alternatives based on a series of qualitative and quantitative parameters. It is suggested that the analytic hierarchy process be used to evaluate options and select the best option. The article presents the findings of a search for the most environmentally friendly bio-sourced thermal insulating material for buildings

Key performance indicators for sustainable manufacturing evaluation in automotive companies

The automotive industry is regarded as one of the most important and strategic industry in manufacturing sector. It is the largest manufacturing enterprise in the world and one of the most resource intensive industries of all major industrial system. However, its products and processes are a significant source of environmental impact. Thus, there is a need to evaluate sustainable manufacturing performance in this industry. This paper proposes a set of initial key performance indicators (KPIs) for sustainable manufacturing evaluation believed to be appropriate to automotive companies, consisting of three factors divided into nine dimensions and a total of 41 sub-dimensions. A survey will be conducted to confirm the adaptability of the initial KPIs with the industry practices. Future research will focus on developing an evaluation tool to assess sustainable manufacturing performance in automotive companies

Factors for implementing green supply chain management in the construction industry

Purpose: The objectives of this study are to elaborate on the concepts, dimensions and elements of green supply chain management (GSCM) and develop a framework of GSCM implementation for the construction industry Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents the findings from a study where experts were asked to contribute their opinions related to GSCM in the construction industry. To develop the model, the Delphi method was used. The objective of this method is to achieve the most reliable consensus in a group of experts Findings: The research result is a developed framework for GSCM in the construction industry comprising five concepts, 22 dimensions, and 82 elements. Research limitations/implications: The limitation of this research is that its output was the discovered elements, but it did not cover the implementation of this model in construction projects, so some elements may be missing. Practical implications: The output of the research could give new perspective to manage the construction project based on Green Supply Chain Method. Social implications: The stakeholder of the construction project has to learn with this concept (Green Supply Chain) in order to improve construction’s project performance. Originality/value: The originality of this research is that it is a new theme in the area of the construction supply chain. Previous research merely considered the concept of GSCM in construction. Therefore, this research develops an assessment model for performance indicators of GSCM implementation in construction projects.Peer Reviewe