Design for end-of-life value framework for vehicle design and development process

Abstract

Nowadays, with growing public concern over environmental issues, companies are under pressure from government and society to reduce the impact of their activities. Based on that, in the early 1990’s the European Union identified End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV) as a priority waste stream and a directive was introduced to protect the environment. Automotive companies are being pushed by environmental awareness and legislation to recycle, remanufacture and reuse the components at the end of life and also to reduce the quantity of manufacturing waste generated. Within this scenario, a design tool is needed for automotive design processes to fulfil the requirement of the European Union Directive on End-of-Life Vehicles. Besides that, the role of design in modern manufacturing is becoming even more important with companies adopting design tools as profit generating business elements especially for the automotive recycling or dismantling companies. Hence, this paper discusses a Design for End-of-Life (DFEL) Value framework for the vehicle design and development process. The framework described in this paper consists of 4 main steps: investigation of the current situation, Recycling Function Deployment (RFD) analysis for value and cost, characteristics selection and lastly decision for detail design. RFD is a new idea based on the concept of Quality Function Deployment (QFD). It is believed that the adoption of DFEL Value concept can help the designer to design the products to fulfil the end-of-life requirements. This paper concludes with a discussion and further direction for this research.