Collection Quality-oriented Recycling Channel Design for End-of-life Vehicles (ELVs) based on a Fuzzy Matter-element Modeling Approach

Driven by circular economy philosophy and sustainability requirement, end-of-life vehicle (ELV) recycling management as one of sustainable practices has been widely performed by practitioners and academies in automobile sector. However, the single material recycling operation practice in industrial plants ignores the heterogeneous collection quality of ELVs, leading to the inefficient re-utilization and resources waste. This paper shifts our eyes to multiple recycling channel design based on the discrepant recycling quality of collected ELVs. Besides, the multiple recycling channel based 4 R recycling operations (re-use, recovery, remanufacturing, and material recycling) is proposed to assist achieve lean recycling management. Facing with the integrated massive uncertainty data, the collection quality is measured and evaluated by developing an improved fuzzy matter-element modeling approach, contributing to the precise recycling and efficiency improvement by multiple recycling channel design. Finally, the experiment study of a numerical case is conducted, and results show that the designed decision-making framework could help manufacturers to design the corresponding recycling channel for better achieve lean ELV recycling management.