Design for Assembly and Disassembly

A review is made of design for assembly (DFA) methods developed over the last fifteen years. It is found that implementation of DFA at the early conceptual stage of design has led to enormous benefits including simplification of products, lower assembly and manufacturing costs, reduced overheads, improved quality and reduced time to market. DFA is now being broadened to include consideration of the difficulty of manufacture of the individual parts to be assembled and is providing the necessary basis for teamwork and simultaneous engineering. More recently, environmental concerns are requiring that disassembly for service and recycling be considered during product design - in fact, total life cycle costs for a product are becoming an essential part of simultaneous engineering. This keynote paper concludes with a discussion of current developments of design for disassembly (DFD).