ABSTRACT
Product recovery seeks to obtain materials and parts from old or outdated products through recycling and remanufacturing in order to minimize the amount of waste sent to landlls. Gungor and Gupta (1999) and Ilgin and Gupta (2010) provide an extensive review of product recovery. See Wang and Gupta (2011) and Ilgin and Gupta (2012) for more information on remanufacturing and green supply chain management. The rst crucial and the most time-consuming step of product recovery is disassembly. Disassembly is dened as the systematic extraction of valuable parts and materials from discarded products through a series of operations to use in remanufacturing or recycling after appropriate cleaning and testing operations. Disassembly operations can be performed at a single workstation, in a disassembly cell or on a disassembly line. Although a single workstation
12.1 Introduction .................................................................................................. 289 12.2Notations ....................................................................................................... 291 12.3Problem Denition and Formulation ............................................................292 12.4Proposed River Formation Dynamics Approach ..........................................296
