A case-based reasoning approach to planning for disassembly

With recycling regulations, resource conservation needs and an increased awareness of the state of the environment by both the consumer and the producer, many companies are establishing disassembly plants and developing product designs that specifically facilitate disassembly. Once disassembled, the items can be reused, recycled or discarded. One can identify two distinct aspects of the disassembly problem: design for disassembly (DFD) and planning for disassembly (PFD). The goal of DFD is to design products that are easy to disassemble. On the other hand, the objective of PFD is to identify efficient sequences to disassemble products. This paper focuses on the PFD aspect of disassembly. Because there could be many ways to disassemble a given product, PFD knowledge is accumulated by experience. Such knowledge is valuable, and should be captured, saved and reused to solve similar problems that arise in the future. In this paper, we propose case-based reasoning (CBR) as an approach to solve PFD problems. CBR is based on the fundamental principle that problem solving can benefit from solutions to past problems that have been attempted. The technique and issues related to the application of CBR to PFD are presented.