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Control and Decision-making Process in Disassembling Used Electronic Products

Luminiţa DUŢĂ1, Florin Gheorghe FILIP2,3
1 Valahia State University
18-24 Unirii Ave., Targoviste – Romania
duta@valahia.ro
2 The Romanian Academy
3 I C I Bucharest
(National Institute for R & D in Informatics)

8-10 Averescu Blvd.
011455 Bucharest 1, Romania
pribeanu@ici.ro

Abstract: Due to awareness of the product life cycle’s impact on the environment, manufacturers have started to embrace the concept of resource recovery systems as an intermediate solution to the environmental problem. The disassembly process is the main stage in recycling of the manufactured products. Disassembly promotes reuse, recycling, material and energetical recovery. It needs advanced control and real-time decision making schemes. In this article, the authors aim at surveying several state-of the art solutions of robotized disassembly cells.

Keywords: Decision trees, electronic equipment recycling, flexible manufacturing cells, models, Petri nets, real-time.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Luminiţa DUŢĂ, Florin Gheorghe FILIP, Control and Decision-making Process in Disassembling Used Electronic Products, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 17 (1), pp. 17-26, 2008.

1. Introduction

For environmental and economic reasons the objective of modern technology is turning away from deposition and incineration of end-of-life products towards a far reaching product recycling. Disassembly is the main stage in the product end-of-life treatment. The aim of this process is to extract the reusable parts of the product, as well as the dangerous materials. Products submitted to the disassembly process are out of use so we have to take into account their physical state. The major problem in a disassembly process is the occurrence of an uncertainty in the possibility of components separation. Deteriorations and deformations of some elements, the absence of one or more components, the presence of corrosion and rust are perturbations often encountered in the process of dismantling (Duta, Henrioud , Filip, 2002).In the case of the manual disassembly, the perturbation is analyzed by a human operator who must make decisions in real-time. In the case of an automatic process, specialized detection and analyze tools are needed. That is why, at present, an entire automatic disassembly system has proved to be an expensive investment. Consequently efforts are made to design appropriate methods to optimize the process of components valorization. The aim of disassembly process is to regain the value of parts and materials by repairing, reusing and energy recovering operations. Due to the difficulties in disassembly of electronic devices as well as other industrial products, continuous research has taken place in this area. Since the early ’90s research works have addressed four major problems: a) evaluation of the disassembly process, b) design of disassembly cells, c) planning of disassembly motions and sequences, and d) disassembling products by use of intelligent sensors and flexible actuators. At the beginning, most work aimed at proposing concepts and generic models of disassembly cells, for consumer goods, cars, TVs and PCs.

Nowadays, several initial solutions have been developed and employed for semiautomatic disassembly. In Europe there exists new pressure in the area of electronic disassembly since in February 2003 the European Parliament passed a directive of the European Commission (ED, 2003) which states that, from August 2005, each industry has to take back its end-of-life products without charging a fee, being then responsible for their ecologically acceptable annihilation. This paper aims at surveying a number of solutions in the field of disassembly cells for electronic devices and proposes several further development directions.

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