Aim and Scope

Many electronic goods have a short life cycle today. They are replaced as soon as they show signs of wear, or just because they go out of fashion. In 2019, 54 million tonnes of electronic waste (e-waste) were generated in the world: nine times the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza. The amount of e-waste is rising three times faster than the world’s population and is silently polluting the world.

E-waste is also a key resource in terms of its potential for recovering valuable materials. Every year, about $10 billion worth of gold, copper and other precious metals are thrown in the mountain of e-waste. Only 17% of the e-waste was recycled in the last years, often by unsafe or non-optimal procedures. As electronic and electrical goods often contain toxic materials, the impressive increase in production and waste related to these goods can damage human health and the environment. Recovering these products is a priority.

Product recovery starts with the disassembly, an industrial process that extracts valuable parts and materials from products through a series of tasks performed in a disassembly line made up of workstations. Disassembly problems (DPs) are optimization problems that aim to determine which tasks to perform at each workstation so as to meet the precedences among tasks, and optimize various measures of effectiveness, safety and sustainability. DPs can also be aimed at setting up optimal disassembly lines, and at designing products in order to make remanufacturing easier. DPs are NP-hard, and are characterized by time constraints (generally stochastic), precedence constraints and a huge number of variables. DPs typically involve multiple objectives, often more than three, thus becoming many-objective problems with a huge and highly constrained search space.

Evolutionary Computation can deal with the hardness of these problems and can help find Pareto-optimal solutions that promote efficiency, safety and sustainability in order to increase the amount of e-waste recycled and reduce the impact on human health and the environment in years to come.