Disassembly Precedence Graph Generation

Abstract

Increasingly tough regulations and voluntary initiatives for the environment have pressured manufacturers to be more responsible for the end-of-life (EOL) treatments of their products. The industry has started to realize the importance of the sustainable products, which is only possible through the closed loop of the product life cycle. In order to establish an efficient closed loop of the product life cycle, mostly disassembly is necessary. One of the important issues of design for disassembly (DfD) is to evaluate ease of disassembly steps, so that designer can make decisions about sequences and level of disassembly. EOL Disassembly decisions are influenced by accessibility of the components, EOL options of the material, the environmental impact of the components and processes, the disassembly time, and the net benefit from the EOL recovery. Designers shall not to be assumed to be DfD experts. Therefore some software tools to support designer to generate disassembly sequences, which can be used for evaluating the ease of disassembly have been developed. In this paper, the systematical search approach for disassembly precedence graph, the environmental impact and the cost calculation algorithm, which has been used in the EOL Recovery Information System (ERIS) are presented.