Planning Demand-Driven Disassembly for Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing has received increasing attention in the recent past as more companies engage in product recovery management.

Ian M. Langella examines the planning of disassembly for remanufacturing of used products, yielding components which are reassembled into "as good as new" items. Through a thorough analysis of the underlying planning problem, fundamental insights are attained and heuristic solution methods are developed and tested. Although the heuristics exhibit good performance, they remain simple enough to be applied to industrial-sized problems. The author considers both settings where yields are deterministic and stochastic and where the amount of returned products is constrained.