Decision-Making Regarding the Futurity of an End-of-Use Product

Surendra M. Gupta, Northeastern University
Kishore K. Pochampally, Northeastern University

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Originally published in the Proceedings of the 2004 Decision Sciences Institute Conference, Boston, Massachusetts, pp. 6291-6296, November 20-23, 2004

Abstract

We believe that for some end-of-use products, it might make more sense to make necessary repairs to the products and sell them on second-hand markets than to disassemble them for subsequent re-processing (remanufacturing and/or recycling). To this end, we propose an approach that uses Bayesian updating process and fuzzy set theory, to decide if it is sensible to repair an improperly functioning end-of-use product of interest for subsequent sale on a second-hand market. Furthermore, we employ the fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process as well as the method of total preferences, to select the most potential market to sell the repaired end-of-use product on, from a set of candidate second-hand markets.