The disassembly problem and the blood cracking decision process

The selection of the optimal disassembly plan is a key problem in the design of many industrial processes, given its influence in the final cost of products. Design for disassembling is of increasing importance mainly due to environmental management and maintenance accessibility concerns. In this paper we study the selection of a good disassembly plan, based on the knowledge of initial separation costs for any couple of components. We have developed a rational way of evaluating the separation cost for any number of different components, based on the given binary costs. As recursive exploration of the solution tree is not a practical procedure for real problems, a heuristic approach was developed. This procedure was used to solve a real problem: the most convenient way of decomposing animal blood in slaughterhouses -a serious environmental concern- from an economic point of view, finally obtaining eatable proteins. This is converted into a disassembly problem, simply by considering blood proteins as the components of an assembly that must be separated into parts.