Integrated disassembly planning and scheduling

Increasing social and political awareness of global resource scarcity and climate-relevant emissions have formed our modern understanding of sustainable industrial goods production and consumption. As a result, more and more companies have come to develop and incorporate the principles of environmentally conscious manufacturing. This means to design, produce and deliver products in line with ecological standards but also to deal with end-of-life products by the means of repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing or recycling. Efficient disassembly plays a key role in enabling these potentials in the first place but can also help limiting losses from disposal.

In this PhD project, research on novel approaches to combine the problems of process planning and machine scheduling is done considering multi-product disassembly on a shop floor. Problem complexity interacts closely with the assumptions made concerning the disassembly process. Some of the disassembly characteristics surveyed are:

• Disassembly process plan flexibility: there are several feasible operations sequences to process a disassembly job.
• Parallel disassembly: seperate sub-assemblies of the same product may be disassembled simultaneously using different stations.
• Selective disassembly: disassembly of a product may remain incomplete meaning that not only basic parts but also sub-assemblies are released for further use. Furthermore, disassembly process planning can involve decisions on recovery options such as reuse, repair, refurbishment, recyling and disposal.

One major goal of the research is to provide efficient mathematical formulations for the exact solution of the combined problem. Moreover problem-specific heuristics are explored to enable solution of real-world instances in reasonable time.