A Petri net approach to disassembly process planning

Recycling and remanufacturing involve product disassembly to retrieve the desired parts and/or subassemblies. Disassembly is a systematic method for separating a product into its constituent parts, components, or other groupings. Disassembly process planning is critical in minimizing the amount of resources (e.g., time and money) invested in disassembly and maximizing the level of automation of the disassembly process and the quality of the parts (or materials) recovered. We propose an algorithm which automatically generates a disassembly Petri net (DPN) from a geometrically-based precedence matrix. The resulting DPN can be analyzed to generate all feasible disassembly process plans (DPPs), and cost functions can be used to determine the optimal DPP; alternatively, heuristic methods may be used to generate near-optimal DPPs. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.