Design for product embedded disassembly sequence

Due to the increased responsibility for the end-of-life (EOL) treatments of products by the manufacturers, the ease of disassembly has become a key design issue for mass-produced products. As an extension of the conventional design for disassembly (DFD), this paper presents a computational method for designing assemblies that can be disassembled only in specified sequences. Given an ideal disassembly sequence that maximizes the profit in the absence of geometric constraints, the method simultaneously determines the spatial configurations of components, locaters, and joints, such that disassembly can occur only in the sequence. A multi-objective genetic algorithm is utilized to search for Pareto-optimal designs in terms of the unique realization of the given disassembly sequence, the satisfaction of distance specifications among components, and the efficient use of locators on components. A case study on a simplified laptop computer assembly demonstrates the effectiveness of the method