Design for Multiple Life Cycles Support Tool

Malaysia Automotive Institute launched the National Automotive Policy 2014 to enhance the awareness of remanufacturing. However, the lack of awareness to the practice of Design for Remanufacturing and designers are not supported by specific tools to evaluate the important design elements of remanufacturing lead to limitation of remanufacturing activities in Malaysia. Therefore, Design for Multiple Life-Cycles support tool (DFMLCST) is proposed in this paper to evaluate the design parameters of a product at the early stage of design using a modified Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The design tool was validated based on expert opinion via user acceptance test on the support tool. Based on the case study on threshing machine, disassemblability and serviceability (>20%) was found to be the most two important design elements followed by reassembly (12%). As a conclusion, DFMLCST has successfully developed and performed as a platform to implementing DFMLC into a product.