Disassembly scheduling with capacity constraints: Minimizing the number of products disassembled

Abstract

Disassembly scheduling, one of the important operational problems in disassembly systems, is the problem of determining the timing and quantity of disassembling used or end-of-life products to satisfy the demand of their parts or components over a given planning horizon. This paper focuses on the case of single product type without parts commonality while the resource capacity restrictions are considered explicitly. The problem is formulated as an integer programming model with the objective of minimizing the number of products disassembled, and a solution algorithm is suggested after deriving its optimal solution properties. Computational experiments are done on various test problems, and the results show that the algorithm suggested in this paper gives optimal solutions for the test problems within a very short amount of computation time.