ABSTRACT
From the viewpoint of environmental protection, an effi cient planning of disassembly operations takes on strategic importance, since it can improve both the useful life of the product (facilitating service interventions) and the end-of-life phase (favoring the recycling of materials and the reuse of components). After an overview of the main issues and current approaches to the problem of Disassembly Planning, this chapter proposes a new approach aiding the identifi cation of optimal disassembly in relation to service operations and the recovery of resources at the end-of-life. Despite their diverse aims, the two tools proposed here have in common both the modeling typology on which they operate and the logic underlying the search algorithms used. The choice of genetic algorithms is dictated by the complexity inherent in the complete mathematical solution of the problem of generating the disassembly sequences, which suggests the use of a nonexhaustive approach.
