An integrated design method for remanufacturing process based on performance demand

Design for remanufacturing process (DFRP) plays a key role in implementing remanufacturing because it directly affects the performance recovery of the End-of-Life (EoL) products. Since the used parts of EoL products have various failure forms and defects, which make it hard to rapidly generate remanufacturing process scheme to satisfy the performance demand of the remanufactured products. Moreover, remanufacturing process parameters are prone to conflicts during remanufacturing processes, often leading to unsatisfactory remanufacturing processes. To accurately generate remanufacturing process scheme and solve the conflicts, an integrated design method for remanufacturing processes based on performance demand is proposed, which reuses the historical remanufacturing process data to generate the remanufacturing process scheme. Firstly, the Kansei Engineering (KE) and Quality Functional Development (QFD) are applied to analyze the performance demand data and map the demands to the engineering features. Then, Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) is applied to inversely generate the remanufacturing process scheme rapidly to satisfy the performance demands by reusing the historical remanufacturing process data. Meanwhile, Theory of Constraint (TOC) and TRIZ are used to identify and solve the conflicts of the remanufacturing process for the remanufacturing process scheme optimization. Finally, the DFRP of an EoL guide rail is taken as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the result of which shows the design method can quickly and efficiently generate the remanufacturing process scheme.