Copyright © 2012 Pei-Fang (Jennifer) Tsai. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Remanufacturing of used products has become a strategic issue for cost-sensitive businesses. Due to the nature of uncertain supply of end-of-life (EoL) products, the reverse logistic can only be sustainable with a dynamic production planning for disassembly process. This research investigates the sequencing of disassembly operations as a single-period partial disassembly optimization (SPPDO) problem to minimize total disassembly cost. AND/OR graph representation is used to include all disassembly sequences of a returned product. A label correcting algorithm is proposed to find an optimal partial disassembly plan if a specific reusable subpart is retrieved from the original return. Then, a heuristic procedure that utilizes this polynomial-time algorithm is presented to solve the SPPDO problem. Numerical examples are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this solution procedure.