Product Life Control for Inverse Manufacturing

Abstract

Inverse manufacturing is one of the new manufacturing paradigms to solve environmental issues. Its basic concept is to reduce the production and consumption volume of the products, while meeting the consumer's requirements and keeping the profits of companies. To realize inverse manufacturing, product life cycle design is indispensable. On the other hand, developing upgradable products is important to realize inverse manufacturing because these products have longer life, encourage reuse of components, and moreover, create new business chances at lower stages of product life cycles. In this paper, we propose an idea to control life of products to realize longer life of products and reuse of components efficiently. To control product life, we show the method for estimating upgrade design using the life cycle simulation (LCS) system and describe the new system architecture which supports product life cycle design based on the idea of product life control.