Modeling and analysis of disassembly processes of motors using Petri nets

Recycling and demanufacturing have become more and more important due to the increasing environmental problems and depleting natural resources. Industry has been forced to deal with product take-back issues. The used products, to be disassembled, exhibit much uncertainty in their property, component conditions and configuration structures. This paper presents a methodology to model and analyze the demanufacturing process for motors using Petri net (PN) technique. A PN based take-back product explosion topology and its precedence relations during disassembly are presented. We have developed an adaptive scheme to investigate the demanufactured processes by a parametric methodology and tree theory in a PN framework. An adaptive disassembly planner is used to find the flexible operation path and maximum benefit procedure once the product-disassembly parameters are known. An adaptive method to study the critical environmental problem is developed and verified by using a motor demanufacturing model. The result of this approach has thus enhanced the idea that the end-of-life retirement of products should be endowed new life and recovery.