Thesis
A multicriteria decision support method for assessing circular economy pathways of end-of-life products
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2024
- Thesis identifier
- T17091
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201780644
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- This study delves into the pressing need to reduce the environmental impact of human activities, accentuated by ongoing economic expansion and a burgeoning global population. The Circular Economy (CE) paradigm, promoting sustainability, is based on concepts like remanufacturing, recycling, and reuse to minimize waste and promote resource efficiency. The primary research question of this thesis is the exploration of holistic evaluation methods for End-of-Life (EoL) pathways for a core disposition problem, incorporating both quantitative and qualitative measures. The study aims to develop a method for evaluating available EoL pathways based on multiple criteria from the environmental, economic, social, and technical domains. By integrating various established tools and introducing new ones, this research presents an innovative method for EoL decision-making. The Hierarchical Attribute Liaison Graph (HALG) and the Bill of Materials (BoM) were used to capture the product's structure. The ease of disassembly Metric (eDiM) was used to quantify the effort needed to replace critical components. Then, through economic and environmental analysis of multiple remanufacturing scenarios, the Circular Economy Design Analysis (CEDA) graph was created. The CEDA was used to illustrate to the decision maker the remanufacturability of the product under analysis. After the practitioner’s input was captured across multiple decision clusters, the Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) Preference Ranking Organisation Method (PROMETHEE) was used to rank the available EoL pathways. Some of the EoL pathways were eliminated due to solution constraints captured by the proposed method based on the partitioner’s input. The proposed method was rigorously evaluated through feedback from the industry and validated through two utterly different case studies. The proposed method is the first to introduce a visualization tool for depicting a product’s design remanufacturability based on the economic and environmental aspects of multiple pre-defined remanufacturing scenarios. Furthermore, this study's insights significantly broaden the understanding of EoL decision-making, demonstrating the proposed method that holistically addresses a core disposition problem while considering the practitioner’s input at each stage.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Ijomah, Winifred
- Resource Type
- Note
- This thesis was previously held under moratorium between 11 September 2024 and 11 September 2026.
- DOI
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