AN INTEGRATED DECISION-SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT FOR DFX AUDIT

Environmental issues related to the life cycle of a product have force d companies, especially electronics companies, to adopt new strategies to stay competitive. Whereas until not so long ago environmental issu es in manufacturing were considered, at best, as a cost overhead, toda y that perception has been radically altered. However, to address prod uct life cycle issues, specific techniques and methods have to be unde rstood and applied, for example, design for disassembly and artificial intelligence techniques. An integrated decision-support environment i s proposed, incorporating some of these, to compute the cost/benefits of servicing, discarding or recycling an electronic pager. The pager w as analyzed as, with an ever-increasing user-base, the social and poli tical pressures for product ''take-back'' at the end of its useful lif e is expected to mount. The methodology entails first constructing a d ecision-tree of the disassembly sequence of the product, embodying the relevant material and disassembly costs. The decision to service, dis card or recycle is reached based on a cost/benefit analysis of the alt ernative courses of action. if the alternatives are not clear-cut, or heuristic in nature, fuzzy logic is employed. The software tools, all visual, comprise Axon(R) Idea Processor, Decision Analysis by TreeAge (DATA(TM)), and FuzzyTECH(R).