Disassembly and Classification for Recovery of EOL Products

Recovery of end-of-life (EOL) products is an environmentally and economically sound way to achieve many of the goals of sustainable development. Many product recovery systems are dependent upon destructive disassembly such as shredding, which undesirably causes a large volume of shredder dust and makes parts reuse impossible. Although non-destructive disassembly has been considered as an alternative for solving the problems, the classification of disassembled items has not been sufficiently investigated. In this paper, we propose a model that mathematically optimizes the disassembly and classification of EOL products. Based on the AND/OR graph that illustrates all possible disassembly sequences of a given product, we identify the physical properties that are considered as constraints in the model. As a result of the solution procedure, the recovery problem can be transformed into a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model. We show an example that illustrates the concept of our model.