Open Access

Michaela Hlatky, Sebastian Schötz, Ronald Schmidt-Vollus

• Non- to minor destructive end-of-life disassembly is a prerequisite for high-value material recovery and component reuse in the circular economy. Yet companies lack a standardized device-level metric to evaluate whether or to what extent disassembly can be automated, especially for electronic devices with heterogenous connection elements (CoEls). This paper introduces a framework consisting of a Disassembly Capability Maturity Model (DCMM) and a resulting Automation Readiness Index (ARI), a key figure to assess automation feasibility for the disassembly of electronic devices. The DCMM rates products’ CoEl sets with phase-specific indicators on a five-level maturity scale, while the ARI aggregates these ratings into a single device-level score. A case study on two cordless vacuum cleaners validates the approach. The results show that the method is easy to apply in practice, sensitive to subtle design differences, and yields consistent, comparable outcomes. By guiding design teams towards targeted, incremental improvements, theNon- to minor destructive end-of-life disassembly is a prerequisite for high-value material recovery and component reuse in the circular economy. Yet companies lack a standardized device-level metric to evaluate whether or to what extent disassembly can be automated, especially for electronic devices with heterogenous connection elements (CoEls). This paper introduces a framework consisting of a Disassembly Capability Maturity Model (DCMM) and a resulting Automation Readiness Index (ARI), a key figure to assess automation feasibility for the disassembly of electronic devices. The DCMM rates products’ CoEl sets with phase-specific indicators on a five-level maturity scale, while the ARI aggregates these ratings into a single device-level score. A case study on two cordless vacuum cleaners validates the approach. The results show that the method is easy to apply in practice, sensitive to subtle design differences, and yields consistent, comparable outcomes. By guiding design teams towards targeted, incremental improvements, the framework supports product developers, while the quantification of automation feasibility and the highlighting of critical structural challenges support disassembly planners. This framework provides a structured basis for both comparing disassemblability as well as introducing Design-for-Disassembly (DfD) principles, thereby advancing towards more circular, automated disassembly practices for electronic products.…