Disassembly planning and scheduling: review and further research

This paper focuses on the planning and scheduling problems in disassembly s ystems, in which used or end-of-life products are disassembled into basic p arts and subassemblies for both economic and environmental reasons. The dis assembly planning includes product representation, disassembly sequencing w ith disassembly level and end-of-life options, and related product design/ redesign issues, while the disassembly scheduling is the problem of determi ning the order quantity of the used product to fulfil the demand of disasse mbled parts and subassemblies. This paper presents a review of the state-of -the-art articles and suggests the corresponding further research direction s. The research directions suggested in this paper can be summarized as: (a) algorithms to generate all feasible disassembly sequences: (b) methods to treat uncertainty about estimating recovery values, product states and disassembly operations; (c) disassembly scheduling models to consider system capacity and uncertain ty. In particular, the integration of disassembly planning and scheduling probl ems is suggested as a fundamental research direction to develop an integrat ed framework to solve the operational problems in disassembly systems.