Value recovery from end-of-use products facilitated by automated dismantling planning

Circular economy is a promising business model that promotes sustainable development by closing material loops. Making progress toward a circular economy requires the recovery of valuable materials and components from end-of-use products and subsequent reuse of them in some form, thus maximizing the utility of components and materials. Currently, end-of-use products value recovery is carried out without a rational planning, causing the loss of the recoverable value embedded in material and components. To address this problem, dismantling planning and appropriate technologies should be employed to improve the economic performance of end-of-use products value recovery. In this paper, a two-stage dismantling planning method is proposed to find a profitable end-of-use strategy. In the first stage of this method, disassembly optimization model is constructed and can be executed to obtain the optimal disassembly plan allowing maximum preservation of component function value, in a preservative disassembly scenario. To speed up the modeling, a method for automatic generation of AND/OR graph—a structure of incorporating all possible disassembly operations and associated subassemblies, is presented. In the second stage of the method, in order to increase profitability, Pareto analysis is employed to identify bottlenecks to disassembly and automated/destructive technologies are considered to remove the bottlenecks. A hard disk drive serves as a case study to illustrate the suggested method.