Analysis of module reuse in inverse manufacturing

As environmental issues have become serious, the significance of product life cycle is recognized to establish a sustainable society, and Inverse manufacturing concept is discussed for product life cycle. To realize the inverse manufacturing system the prime problem is how to improve the rate of reusing the product modules. Therefore analyzing the life-time of the disassembled modules is very important before the reassembling process. In this paper, first a cumulative damage model is proposed to discuss the failure of the product that is assembled by reuse modules. It is supposed that modules suffer damage due to shocks and fails when the cumulative damage level exceeds the failure level, and compute the probability of failure. Then maintenance costs will be analyzed in order to minimize the expected maintenance cost-rate. The optimal maintenance time T and optimal number of damages N will be also discussed in this cumulative damage model, and the probable safe life-time of module reuse will be explored by the T and N. Finally a numerical example is given for some exponential cases to confirm the validity of the proposed model.