Component oriented remanufacturing decision-making for complex product using DEA and interval 2-tuple linguistic TOPSIS*

Abstract

Remanufacturing has been attracting attentions of global manufacturers as an important sustainable development strategy. Component oriented remanufacturing decision-making for complex product involving two phases is proposed in this paper. The first phase is to decide which components to be remanufactured using DEA. To overcome the drawback of traditional DEA without weight constraints, an augmented DEA is applied to evaluate the efficiencies of the pre-selected components considering manufacturing characteristic, comparative cost advantage and general returned status. The second phase is to select an appropriate remanufacturing concept for each efficient component. Interval 2-tuple linguistic model is used in obtaining and collecting experts’ evaluations. Besides subjective experts’ weights, the objective weights of them are considered in the group decision-making process, which are determined by the precision degree of information experts have given. TOPSIS integrated with interval 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic representation model is proposed to rank alternative remanufacturing concepts. A new distance measuring method between two interval 2-tuple vectors is given out considering both the subjective and objective criteria weights. The objective criterion weight is determined by the discrete degree of the performances of all alternatives on this criterion. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed remanufacturing decision-making approach for complex product.

Keywords

• remanufacturing decision-making
• data envelopment analysis
• interval 2-tuple
• concept selection
• TOPSIS method