Sustainable production and consumption ease of robotic disassembly metric and information for digital product passports in flexible remanufacturing systems

Abstract

Circular economy principles, aimed at waste reduction and optimal resource usage, are set to increasingly utilize digital product passports (DPPs) to store sustainability and circularity-related data. However, critical questions remain regarding the types of information most crucial to facilitate Reuse, Refurbish, Repair, Remanufacturing and Recycling activities. This Information heavily depends on the intended treatment scheme like disassembly type. For instance, manual disassembly offers flexibility but is constrained by limited scalability and safety concerns, whereas robotic disassembly, although cost-efficient for repetitive tasks, is hindered by high capital costs and lacks adaptability. Flexible human-robot cooperative systems present a potential solution by balancing scalability, adaptability, and capital cost. Hence, ease of disassembly information and metrics tailored for such systems would not only benefit product designers in crafting circular designs, but also assist policymakers in assessing product circularity and aid remanufacturers in disassembly task scheduling and allocation. However, no metrics currently exist to assess the ease of disassembly when integrating both manual and robotic disassembly.

Therefore, this study addresses two key research questions: (i) What disassembly information is essential in the DPP for assessing human-robot cooperative disassembly, and (ii) Which metric effectively assesses the ease of human-robot cooperative disassembly using DPP-derived information? To answer these questions, the presented study introduces a demanufacturing cell for flexible remanufacturing systems (Re-FMS), criteria for assessing the feasibility of robotic disassembly and proposes the Robotic ease of Disassembly Metric (Re-DiM) to calculate the human-robot cooperative disassembly times. Finally, recommendations are formulated on essential ease of disassembly information required for DPPs and the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed metric is demonstrated by the application of Re-DiM metric for three distinct product groups: vacuum cleaners, e-bike batteries, and electric vehicle motors. The results present a quantitative comparison between manual and robotic disassembly times, identify the most effective disassembly approach and highlight product design challenges revealed by the metric specific to robotic disassembly for the use-case product groups.