The Recovery Problem in Product Design

Abstract

SUMMARY Design for recovery is aimed at the development of products that are both environmentally compatible and commercially viable. We describe the trade-off between the amount of effort that is expended in recovery operations such as recycling and disassembly, and the corresponding environmental and monetary gains. We call this the recovery problem which is shown to be a special case of the 'traveling salesperson problem'. Optimizing algorithms for the problem are examined. We describe a recovery analysis tool, ReStar, which optimizes the recovery plan. We observe that sometimes it can be environmentally better to only partially recycle a product than to try and recycle every last nut and bolt. The system is aimed at detecting such situations and can help the user to find environmentally better design alternatives.

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