Design for manufacture and design for 'X': concepts, applications, and perspectives

The implementations of design for assembly and design for manufacture (DFM) led to enormous benefits including simplification of products, reduction o f assembly and manufacturing costs, improvement of quality, and reduction o f time to market. More recently, environmental concerns required that disas sembly and recycling issues should be considered during the design stages. The effort to reduce total life-cycle costs for a product through design in novation is becoming an essential part of the current manufacturing industr y. Therefore, researchers begin to focus their attention on design for envi ronment, design for recyclability, design for lifecycle (DFLC), etc. These studies are sometimes referred to as Design for X (DFX). Since the late 199 0s, hundreds of papers have been published pertaining to DFX applications i n manufacturing. Most of them are widely distributed over many different di sciplines and publications. This makes it very difficult for one to locate all the information necessary for the application of DFX in manufacturing. A paper that can help researchers and practitioners applying this emerging technology is highly desirable. The objective of this paper is to present t he concepts, applications, and perspectives of 'DFX' in manufacturing, thus providing some guidelines and references for future research and implement ation. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.