Life cycle management of lcd televisions – case study

Abstract

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) is one of the most significant waste products in modern societies. Disassembly is a critical step to reduce Electrical and Electronic Equipment (EEE) waste. In the past two decades, despite disassembly has been applied to support recycling and remanufacturing of WEEE products worldwide, 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 economic considerations, is becoming an important but still a challenging research topic in recent years. In order to address the issue effectively, in this chapter, space interference matrix is generated based on a product model to represent the space interference relationship between each component, and all feasible disassembly sequences can be obtained by analyzing the space interference matrix with a matrix analysis algorithm. Then, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based selective disassembly planning method embedded with customizable decision-making models is applied, which is capable to achieve optimized selective disassembly sequences for products. Finally, industrial cases on liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions are used to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the developed research.