Deriving product-specific remanufacturing design guidelines based on product information and life cycle scenarios

Remanufacturing is a key strategy of the circular economy. The remanufacturability of a product is highly dependent on its design. Existing studies have proposed guidelines that provide sets of recommendations, best practices, and rules governing design, aimed at enhancing the remanufacturability of products. However, applying these design for remanufacturing (DfRem) guidelines to a target product remains challenging. Existing DfRem guidelines are often too generic or, conversely, tailored to specific products and industries. This lack of adaptability makes it difficult for designers to apply appropriate guidelines based on the unique structural characteristics and expected life cycle of a product. This study aims to address this issue by providing designers with product-specific DfRem guidelines that clarify where and how to apply them. Accordingly, a method for deriving product-specific DfRem guidelines tailored to a target product is proposed. The method comprises two steps. First, it extracts relevant guidelines from a comprehensive repository of existing general DfRem guidelines. Subsequently, they are customized according to the target product. This study utilizes the structure and life cycle of a product as critical extraction and customization information. Our method adopts a large language model-powered agent, utilizing its capacity for autonomous information gathering from complex, dynamic databases through reasoning. We applied the method to a business-use microwave oven to validate its effectiveness. The method successfully generated product-specific DfRem guidelines. Compared with existing studies, the proposed method enables designers to derive product-specific and practical DfRem guidelines tailored to the characteristics of the target product.