A Fuzzy Sustainable Quality Function Deployment Approach to Design for Disassembly with Industry 4.0 Technologies Enablers

Abstract

Integrating sustainability into product design is a proactive circular economy practice and design for disassembly is an essential eco-design practice for complex product manufacturers. Today, industry 4.0 technologies have considerable influence on product life cycle management, and a few studies address the contributions of these technologies to eco-design methods. Designing the appropriate eco-design tool is challenging considering the complexity of products, organizational instruments, the need for integrating diverse databases, customization of the tool, and incorporating the strategic goals. Hence, a systematic approach is required to address the implications of innovative technologies and integrate the different technical, economic, environmental, and social aspects into the design stage. Quality function deployment (QFD) is an effective approach to integrating customers, technical, and business requirements into new product development. Fuzzy Sustainable QFD is an extended version of this method for considering three pillars of sustainability in design and dealing with qualitative linguistic judgments. This paper proposes a Fuzzy sustainable QFD approach to design for disassembly. A numerical example illustrates the application of the proposed method.