Development of a Decision Tool for Assessing the Circularity of Electric Traction Motors

The end-of-life treatment of complex electromechanical products, such as electric traction motors, requires balancing technical, economic, and environmental considerations. Individual components may retain substantial residual value if recovered, cleaned, and inspected, but the costs of disassembly, preparation, and diagnostics can outweigh the benefits of reuse. Disassembly is further constrained by mechanical dependencies, meaning that operations must follow a feasible sequence. The final decision to execute direct reuse, remanufacturing, or recycling must account for both recovered value and the extent of part recovery. To address these challenges, a structured decision framework is needed that represents the disassembly process as a precedence-constrained network of operations, each tied to a potentially recoverable part. The framework consists of three interconnected phases. First, disassembly planning determines a technically feasible execution order and selects operations expected to yield economically meaningful parts. Second, the cleaning and diagnostics phase assigns each recovered part a cleaning outcome and a fault profile, producing estimates of value loss and diagnostic cost, including partial decontamination, handling of delicate components, and probabilistic repair efforts. Third, rule-based decision logic identifies the appropriate end-of-life strategy. The resulting approach supports systematic exploration of disassembly options, transparent cost-benefit evaluation, and alignment of technical feasibility with economic goals.