Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of how disassembly theory developed and continues to develop. To that end, a historical perspective of assembly and disassembly is presented in section 1.1. Section 1.2 highlights different levels of aggregation in assembly and disassembly. Section 1.3 introduces various methodologies that are frequently used for modeling and solving disassembly problems and articulates the choices that have been made in developing this book. Section 1.4 introduces the basic terminology used in the book in an attempt to unify the field as different authors use different aliases for comparable concepts. In section 1.5, the two basic approaches for product representation that appear in this book are discussed. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of subsequent chapters of the book (section 1.6).