Solution space generation for disassembly research on liquid crystal displays televisions

Abstract

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are one of the most significant waste products in modern societies, and disassembly is a critical step to reduce WEEE. In the past two decades, despite there are many research articles published for disassembly research of WEEE, those researches mainly focus on searching optimised disassembly sequences according to different considerations of stakeholders, while another important problem, i.e., the generation of solution space has received little attentions. However, before applying disassembly planning and optimisation techniques in real industrial cases such as Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions, it cannot evade the issue of the solution space generation. In this paper, an effective approach was developed to generate the solution space for LCD televisions. Firstly, six space interference matrices are generated based on a CAD model, which can be used to represent the space relationship of each components in six directions in a Cartesian coordinate system. A matrix analysis algorithm is then developed to obtain all feasible disassembly sequences by analysing the obtained six space interference matrices in a 3D environment. The result can be used as a solution space to support a disassembly planning method to achieve better economic value and environmental protection requirements within an acceptable runtime. Finally, an industrial case on Changhong LCD television of the type LC24F4 is used to verify and demonstrate the performance of the developed research.