A PRODUCT ASSEMBLY AND RESTORATION PLANNING SYSTEM FOR ECOLOGICALLY CONSCIOUS FACTORIES

Ecologically conscious factories (Ecofactories) have been recently proposed as a system-wide restructuring of the manufacturing process to solve the environmental problems posed by conventional methods of production. Ecofactories handle both the manufacturing and retirement (recycling and disposal) of the goods they produce. A central requirement in Ecofactories is the evaluation of a product's reprocessing plan and resulting disassemblability requirements during the design phase. This paper describes ECoPARP, a design tool which uses precedence algorithms to generate a product's assembly and disassembly sequences from the product design and reprocessing plan. The product precedence relations are derived using encoded knowledge from the fields of assembly and recycling, and user input. This precedence-based knowledge framework allows ECoPARP to process knowledge from diverse fields in a systematic way and leads to ease of system expansion. It also leads to a flexible decision-making environment in which the user can restrict the algorithm's search space and query ECoPARP to explain the acceptability or unacceptability of a sequence.