Nonempirical hybrid multi-attribute decision-making method for design for remanufacturing

Design for remanufacturing (DfRem) is the process of considering remanufacturing characteristics during product design in order to reduce the number of issues during the remanufacturing stage. This decision-making in DfRem is influenced by the designers’ subjective preferences owing to a lack of explicitly defined remanufacturing knowledge for designers, which can lead to indecisive design schemes. In order to objectively select the optimal design scheme for remanufacturing, a nonempirical hybrid multi-attribute decision-making method is presented to alleviate the impacts of subjective factors. In this method, design characteristics and demand information are characterized through the matter-element theory. Coupled with design principles, some initial design schemes are proposed. Evaluation criteria are established considering the technical, economic, and environmental factors. The entropy weight and vague set are used to determine the optimal design scheme via a multi-attribute decision-making approach. The design of a bearing assembly machine for remanufacturing is taken as an example to illustrate the practicality and validity of the proposed method. The results revealed that the proposed method was effective in the decision-making of DfRem.