A disassmbly complexity assessment method for sustainable product design

With high consideration of sustainability, product recovery has become a major interest of product manufacturers by retrieving obsolete products. Disassembly processes can make an impact on the product recovery and be necessary to develop sustainable product design by achieving the product recovery strategy. Therefore, this paper proposes a method to assess product disassembly complexity that represents the disassembly difficulty. The component and interface complexities are measured by various factors from design for disassembly (DFD). Then, the product disassembly complexity can be measured by the modified entropy theory with considering the number of components and interfaces. The proposed method contributes to understanding current products' complexity and benchmarking products for better product architecture design. A case study with electric shavers is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.