Integration of disassembly leveling and bin assignment for demanufacturing automation

As an integral part of a product life cycle, demanufacturing is a process of disassembling a product and assigning collection bins for the resultant subassemblies and parts, which are then reused, remanufactured, reengineered, or disposed of. This paper proposes an algorithm to determine disassembly levels and bins in an integrated way to maximize the profit from a used product through balancing the resource invested in disassembly processes, the return, and the environmental impact caused by them. The algorithm utilizes the information from a computer-aided design system and requires minimal user input with the computational complexity of O(n²+mn), where n is the number of parts and final subassemblies in a product, and m is the number of collection bins. It has been successfully used in the development of a demanufacturing stage of a multi-life cycle assessment and analysis tool. The benefit of the proposed algorithm is illustrated through a laptop computer example.