A products generator for testing the performance of disassembly procedures

In recent decades, regulations and markets have been exerting pressure on designers and manufacturers to take more responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products throughout their life cycles. The problem of finding the disassembly sequence represents one of the major challenges when attempting to close product life cycles by carrying out reuse, recycling and remanufacturing practices. Many different techniques have been used to deal with this problem, varying from exact to heuristic solutions. So far, however, not much effort has gone into measuring and comparing the efficiency of this wide set of techniques. This is partly due to the difficulties of getting a wide population of real products, belonging to different industries and with different degree of complexity that might constitute a representative population for carrying out this kind of task. In this paper, a generator of complex products is presented that is able to build up products with hundreds of components joined by different kinds of joints in such a way that a theoretical “good” disassembly sequence is always known. The efficiency of different methods for general products can thus be easily compared. The performance of a Scatter Search algorithm is tested as an example of its application in this case.