A multi-criteria assessment of robotic disassembly to support recycling and recovery

Use of robots in product disassembly is growing in popularity, mainly due to ever-increasing labour costs in both developed and developing countries. However, currently there are no approaches for assessing the trade-offs between environmental benefits, technological feasibility and economic viabili...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Resources, conservation and recycling conservation and recycling, 2019-01, Vol.140, p.158-165
Main Authors: Li, J., Barwood, M., Rahimifard, S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Multi-criteria assessment
Recovery
Recycling
Robotic disassembly
Sustainability
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Summary:Use of robots in product disassembly is growing in popularity, mainly due to ever-increasing labour costs in both developed and developing countries. However, currently there are no approaches for assessing the trade-offs between environmental benefits, technological feasibility and economic viability of robotic disassembly. The work presented in this paper aims to justify the future application of robotic disassembly in products end-of-life management by assessing its sustainability through multiple factors (i.e. environmental, technological and economic performance). This paper proposes a framework for the multi-criteria assessment of robotic disassembly to support recycling and recovery, which consists of three main stages: analysis of recycling options, selection of assessment criteria, and evaluation of disassembly operations. A decision support tool has also been developed to compare the results from different recycling scenarios based on manual and automatic disassembly. A number of automotive electronic components have been used as case studies to illustrate the application of the framework and its associated decision support tool.
ISSN:0921-3449
1879-0658
DOI:10.1016/j.resconrec.2018.09.019