Calculating disassembly yields in a multi-criteria decision-making environment for a disassembly-to-order system

In this paper, we consider the disassembly-to-order (DTO) problem, where a variety of returned products are disassembled to fulfill the demand for specified numbers of components and materials. The objective is to determine the optimal numbers of returned products to disassemble so as to maximize profit and minimize costs. We model the DTO problem using a multi-criteria decision-making approach. Since the conditions of returned products are unknown, the yields from disassembly are considered to be stochastic. To solve the stochastic problem, we use one of the two heuristic approaches (viz., one-to-one approach or one-to-many approach) that converts the problem into a deterministic equivalent. We compare the performance of the two heuristic approaches using a case example.