A heuristic for disassembly planning in remanufacturing system

This study aims to improve the efficiency of disassembly planning in remanufacturing environment. Even though disassembly processes are considered as the reverse of the corresponding assembly processes, under some technological and management constraints the feasible and efficient disassembly planning can be achieved by only well-designed algorithms. In this paper, we propose a heuristic for disassembly planning with the existence of disassembled part/subassembly demands. A mathematical model is formulated for solving this problem to determine the sequence and quantity of disassembly operations to minimize the disassembly costs under sequence-dependent setup and capacity constraints. The disassembly costs consist of the setup cost, part inventory holding cost, disassembly processing cost, and purchasing cost that resulted from unsatisfied demand. A simple but efficient heuristic algorithm is proposed to improve the quality of solution and computational efficiency. The main idea of heuristic is to divide the planning horizon into the smaller planning windows and improve the computational efficiency without much loss of solution quality. Performances of the heuristic are investigated through the computational experiments.