An entropy-based metric for product remanufacturability

Abstract

Manufacturing contributes heavily to environmental life cycle measures such as energy, material use, and water consumption through depletion and pollution. To lessen the environmental impacts, a number of initiatives have been developed. One of such initiatives is the used product take back, a process through which manufacturers collect used products and remanufacture them to like-new condition. However, remanufacturing of the used products at a modest cost is becoming a daunting task for many manufacturers due to the increasing complexity in many products. To mitigate this remanufacturing challenge, this paper develops a metric to quantify the remanufacturability incorporated into the new product at the design stage. The metric is based on entropy, a phenomenon well known in engineering