Modeling and Analysis of End of Life Vehicles Recovery: an Enhanced IDEF0 Methodology (Part I)

Abstract

During the entire life cycle of a vehicle, from design, manufacture, usage to final recovery, there exist very complex materials, energy and information flow as well as the interactions among different stages. To better understand this closed loop, it’s important and significant to model the whole loop from a system engineering point of view. This work proposed a unified modeling method based on enhanced IDEF0. By taking materials flow, information flow, energy flow as well as the interactions among processes into account, a holistic hierarchical model for the entire life cycle of vehicles was established in this work, which helps to provide a novel way of understanding the recovery infrastructure, identifying the key issues to be tackled, and further finding the opportunities to improve it.