A Decision Support System for Integrated Assembly and Disassembly Planning Using a Ga Approach

Abstract

In a decision support system for a complete product life cycle management, both assembly planning and disassembly planning need to be considered for producing an assembled product. To produce an assembled product, an assembly planning scheme is required to generate a proper assembly sequence with which the components can be grouped and fixed to construct a final product. At the end of the product life cycle, a disassembly planning scheme is performed to generate a disassembly sequence to disassemble and recycle the product. In this research, a new decision support system for a complete product life cycle management by integrating assembly and disassembly planning is presented. First, the spatial relationships of the components and the precedence of the assembly and disassembly operations are analyzed. Second, a genetic algorithm approach is applied to evaluate the integrated assembly and disassembly costs to find the good assembly sequences and disassembly sequences. A cost function by integrating the assembly costs and disassembly costs is formulated and used as an objective function. An example product is demonstrated and discussed. The test result shows that the decision support system is feasible and effective for integrating assembly and disassembly planning with a complete product life cycle management.