Evaluating the circularity and multi-lifecycle green profit of product family design

As sustainability and circularity are emerging as the new normal for business, manufacturers have attempted to apply recovery strategies such as reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling to product family design to generate higher profits and mitigate the environmental impact. Compared to single-product design, product family design involves developing sharing decisions in which components and operations are common across product variants. However, existing approaches have not clearly explained the multi-lifecycle effects of sharing decisions. This paper proposes an evaluation model that quantifies the multi-lifecycle economic profit and environmental impact of a product family design. A bi-objective optimization model with economic and environmental objectives is developed to assess the effects of sharing over multiple lifecycles. The evaluation results provide a broader understanding of the multi-lifecycle effect of component and operation sharing and the trade-off between economic profit and environmental impact. This study considers a smartphone family design case to validate the proposed model.