Ontology-Based Product Modeling for Disassembly Sequence Planning in Remanufacturing

Remanufacturing, an emerging industry, holds immense potential for sustainable growth and broad application prospects. Through a series of remanufacturing processes, the life cycle of End-of-Life (EoL) products can be extended, and their residual value improved. The disassembly process significantly influences the overall efficiency of remanufacturing. However, due to the inherent uncertainties and variable conditions of EoL products, as well as the lack of unified organizational management structures and standardized description methodologies for these products, planning the EoL product's disassembly sequence becomes a challenging task. To address this challenge, this research introduces an ontology-based product modeling method to manage the disassembly knowledge of EoL products. Building upon this, the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) reasoning rules and topological sorting methods are proposed. These methods along with the proposed ontology model of EoL product can infer the relationships among product components and realize the automation of disassembly sequence planning in remanufacturing. Finally, a gear pump is taken as the case study. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified through the automatic planning of the gear pump's disassembly sequence.