The Development of a Vehicle Recovery Remanufacturing Tool: An Interior Parts Analysis Indicator

Abstract

The rapid growth of the automotive industry has placed a significant demand on earth resources such as metal and minerals. This has led to a shortage of materials and an increase in material prices. One of the solutions to enhance resource management is to perform parts remanufacturing during product design to ease the part classification. However, this initiative is not yet widely explored, particularly in terms of guideline or tool development. For example, the recyclers have no idea on how to decide the suitability of an automotive part to be remanufactured. This study aims to develop a vehicle recovery analysis guideline to assist those in the automotive industry in developing vehicles with higher remanufacturing rates during the product development stage. In this study, there are three main criteria, and 11 sub-criteria were determined from the literatures that influences the vehicle part remanufacturing rate. These criteria are classified into three main categories namely: selection of material, method of joining, and mechanical design. Next, quantitative approach namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology was applied to collect the pairwise comparison data from the automotive industry practitioners. The gathered data were analyzed using Expert Choice V11 software to determine the criteria priority weightage to influence the remanufacturing activities. From the analysis, the three most influencing criteria are type of joining (0.216), durability (0.131), type of material (0.103), whereas the criteria that least being considered are cost of material (0.018), cleanability (0.04), and design complexity (0.041). From the obtained priority weightage, these data were used to develop ana assessment tool using Microsoft Excel software. The assessment tool was validated by experts to ensure its feasibility to be applied as a remanufacturing guideline. Positive feedbacks were obtained from the experts especially on the outputs of assessment tool which able to assist the practitioner in product design and ease the process of remanufacturing.