Selective disassembly planning for sustainable management of waste electrical and electronic equipment

Abstract

Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) are one of the most significant waste streams in modern societies. Full disassembly of WEEE is rarely an ideal solution due to high disassembly costs. 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 paper, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based selective disassembly planning method embedded with customizable decision-making models has been developed. The developed method is flexible to handle WEEE to meet the various requirements of stakeholders, and is capable to 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 application scenarios.