Scheme selection of design for disassembly (DFD) based on sustainability: A novel hybrid of interval 2-tuple linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy numbers and regret theory

Abstract Design for disassembly (DFD) is an essential design technique to consider the disassembly and recyclability of a product at the initial design stage. An efficient DFD technique provides the disassembling and recycling easily. However, the recent trends of disassembling and recycling are to consider the aspects of environmental and social sustainability. Due to shortage of energy and deterioration of the ecological environment, the sustainable production is an active research topic to use the economic and social benefits as the evaluation standard of a design scheme as well as its environmental characteristics. This paper provides a new approach for DFD based on sustainability. In this regard, a hybrid multi-attribute decision making (MADM) method integrating the regret theory (RT) and the entropy weighting method is firstly developed. To implement the proposed approach, an eight-criterion evaluation system of schemes based on sustainability including the factors of disassembly energy consumption, disassembly accessibility, fastener ratio, toxic material proportion, material recovery rate, disassembly expense, production and use noise, and waste emissions, is established. To better describe the fuzziness of human thinking and to avoid information loss/distortion during information aggregation phases, the evaluation information given by experts is presented by our proposed interval 2-tuple linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (I2LIFNs). The weight vector of index structure is determined by the entropy weighting method under the fuzzy environment. The RT is employed to get the final order of alternatives by considering and quantitating both the risk attitude and the regret attitude of experts. To show the applicability of this study, a case study including four kinds of refrigerator schemes, is conducted to validate the proposed method. An extensive comparison with other recent and state of the art methods along with a sensitivity analysis of 13 experiments, is executed to verify effectiveness and reliability of the proposed I2LI-RT method. Finally, the experimental results show that: 1) disassembly accessibility (C2), fastener ratio (C3), waste emissions (C8) and disassembly energy consumption (C1) have a large impact on the scheme selection of DFD based on sustainability as those attributes carry relatively the larger weights; 2) our proposed method outperforms other recent and state of the art methods and 3) the chosen scheme A1 is the winner in the majority of the sensitivity analysis cases (10 out of 13). At last but not least, the main finding is to furnish a systematic and efficient decision support tool for sustainable performance evaluation of product schemes of DFD.