Disassembly sequence planning for products with defective parts in product recovery

Recycling and remanufacturing are important forms of product/material recovery which involve product disassembly to retrieve the desired parts and/or subassemblies. Disassembly is a systematic method for separating a product into its constituent parts, components or other groupings. Efficient disassembly requires development of disassembly sequence plans (DSPs). Generating DSPs describing the sequence of parts during disassembly is not a trivial problem since DSP generation is described to be NP-complete. Further complicating matters is the presence of a high degree of uncertainty due to upgrading/downgrading of the product during its use by the customers and defects occurring either when in use or during disassembly. In this paper, we address the uncertainty related difficulties in disassembly sequence planning. To this end, we present a methodology to develop a framework for dealing with uncertainty in DSP implementation and demonstrate it using a simple example.