The use of data envelopment analysis for product recovery

The latest enhancements in industrial technologies, especially the ones in electronics industry, have provided organizations with the ability to manufacture faster and more economical products. This fact, coupled with the growing interest and demand for the latest technology, have led electronic equipment manufacturers to start producing "high-tech" and "personalized" products at an increasing rate. This has led to a high rate of obsolescence for electronic products worldwide, even though the majority of these "obsolete" products still function. In this paper, we investigate a product recovery facility where the end-of-life (EOL) products are taken back from the last users and are brought into the facility for processing. We assume that there are multiple types of EOL products and that a combination of these can be disassembled to provide for a sufficient number of demanded components and materials. We then present a data envelopment analysis (DEA) algorithm to determine the number and types of the EOL products that will be required to fulfill the demand. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the functionality of the methodology.