A Distributed Service of Selective Disassembly Planning for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment with Case Studies on Liquid Crystal Display

Abstract

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are one of the most significant waste streams in modern societies. In the past decade, disassembly of WEEE to support remanufacturing and recycling has been growingly adopted by industries. With the increasing customization and diversity of Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) and more complex assembly processes, full disassembly of WEEE is rarely an ideal solution due to high disassembly cost. Selective disassembly, which prioritizes operations for partial disassembly according to the legislative and economic considerations of specific stakeholders, is becoming an important yet still challenging research topic in recent years. In this chapter, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based selective disassembly planning method embedded with customizable decision-making models and a novel generic constraint handling algorithm has been developed. With multi-criteria decision making models, the developed method is flexible to handle WEEE to meet the various requirements of stakeholders. Based on the generic constraint handling and intelligent optimization algorithms, the research is capable to process complex constraints and achieve optimized selective plans. Practical cases on Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) televisions have been used to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the research in different application scenarios. A distributed environment to deploy the service for remote access and control has been designed to support collaborative work.