Flexible Process Planning and End-of-Life Decision-Making for Product Recovery Optimization Based on Hybrid Disassembly

Abstract

With growing environmental and sustainability-related concerns, recovery optimization of mechanical products has been gaining increased exposure. It facilitates environmental sustainability through the improvement in the life-cycle material efficiency and reduction in environmental impact with disassembly sequence planning, component reuse, and material recycling. Traditional product recovery separates end-of-life (EOL) products into components and selects EOL options of components. However, there are many practical cases in which the recovery of a set of subassemblies and components leads to better net revenue than that of a complete set of single components. This paper proposes to model and optimize hybrid disassembly and EOL operations of product recovery to maximize the recovery profit and minimize the environmental impact. Flexible process planning of hybrid disassembly determines a disassembly level by identifying the reusability of subassemblies and disassembly sequences mixed with subassemblies and components. Optimal EOL decisions for each subassembly and component are investigated such that the economic and environmental objectives can be achieved. Finally, a case study is described to illustrate the proposed method and the influence on decision variables of the tradeoff between the recovery profit and environmental impact is discussed. Note to Practitioners —This paper deals with the process planning and EOL decision-making problem of product recovery. Based on hybrid disassembly, this paper proposes a flexible process planning and EOL decision-making method for product recovery. Flexible process planning of hybrid disassembly determines a disassembly level by identifying the reusability of subassemblies and disassembly sequences mixed with subassemblies and components. Optimal EOL decisions for each subassembly and component are investigated such that the economic and environmental objectives can be achieved. The goal of this paper is to model and optimize hybrid disassembly and EOL operations of product recovery to maximize the recovery profit and minimize the environmental impact. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can leads to small environmental impact and low cost. Subassemblies and components with high reliability and expensive price are suggested to be destined for reuse. Minimizing transportation distances is more effective to reduce product recovery cost. Such results can help decision makers to perform better judgments when a disassembly process of an EOL product is executed.