A Green Design for Assembly Model for Integrated Design Evaluation and Assembly and Disassembly Sequence Planning

A green design for assembly model is presented to integrate design evaluation and assembly and disass embly sequence planning by evaluating the three activities in one int grated model. For an assembled product, an assembly sequence planning model is required for assembling the product at the start of the product life cycle. A disassembly sequence planning model is needed for isassembling the product at the end. In a green product life cyc le, it is important to plan how a product can be disassembled, reused, or recycled, before the product is actually assembled and produced. Giv en a product requirement, there may be several design alternativ e cases to design the same product. In the different design cases, th e assembly and disassembly sequences for producing the product can be different. In this research, a new model is presented to concurre ntly valuate the design and plan the assembly and disassembly sequen ces. First, the components are represented by using graph based mod els. Next, a particle swarm optimization (PSO) method with a new ncoding scheme is developed. In the new PSO encoding scheme , a particle is represented by a position matrix defining an assemb ly sequence and a disassembly sequence. The assembly and disassembly sequences can be simultaneously planned with an objective of mini iz ng the total of assembly costs and disassembly costs. The test resu l s show that the presented method is feasible and efficient for solv ing the integrated design evaluation and assembly and disassembly sequ ence planning problem. An example product is implemented and illu strated in this paper. Keywords—green design, assembly and disassembly sequence planning, green design for assembly, particle swarm optimization.