Disassembly and distribution planning considering 3D printing technology

Increasing world population and consumption leads to the increase in total amount of waste. Recycling of valuable materials in waste is quite important for both environmental awareness and cost. All these processes increase the importance of disassembly, which has been popular in recent years. An effective routing plan to distribute the recycled components, generated by the disassembly process, to the remanufacturing centres (RC), is also important for recycling operations. Thus, the vehicle routing problem (VRP) plays an important role in the distribution of recycled components. Additionally, some parts may be damaged during the disassembly process, due to the operation complexity or workers. In the present case, additive manufacturing (AM) can be used to produce new parts instead of damaged parts. Using only the required amount of material, the 3D printing (3DP) technology will be able to prohibit the waste material problem in production and by this means, pollution will be prevented. This thesis introduces the integrated disassembly line balancing and routing problem (I-DLB-RP), the I-DLB-RP with 3D printers (I-DLB-RP-3DP), the integrated collection-disassembly-distribution problem (I-CDDP), the I-DLB-RP with mobile AM (I-DLB-RP-MAM), respectively. Several mathematical formulations are presented for solving the aforementioned problems and a number of scenario analysis are considered to indicate the benefits.