This paper considers the problem of determining the quantity and timing of disassembling used or end-of-life products in order to satisfy the demand of their parts or components over a finite planning horizon. We focus on the case of single product type without parts commonality, i.e., assembly product structure. The objective is to minimize the sum of setup, disassembly operation, and inventory holding costs. Several properties of optimal solutions are derived, and then a branch and bound algorithm is developed based on the La-grangian relaxation technique. Results of computational experiments on randomly generated test problems show that the algorithm finds the optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of computation time.
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