Effective treatment of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) is critical for increasing resource efficiency and meeting the closed-loop recycling targets outlined in the European ELV Directive. Disassembly plays a key role in enabling the reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling of components and materials. The disassembly process planning (DPP) facilitates the decision on the disassembly level, the disassembly sequence, and the assignment of end-of-life options. Petri net-based models are commonly used to represent the concurrency and dependencies among these variables. However, current approaches do not distinguish between destructive and non-destructive disassembly, a critical gap for differentiating recycling-targeted from remanufacturing-oriented strategies. Moreover, their application is hindered by high modeling effort and the lack of scalable construction methods. This paper presents a novel 12-tuple extended Petri net (EPN) considering both non-destructive and destructive disassembly steps and provides a method for constructing the Petri net in a scalable manner. It extends existing EPNs by explicitly modeling destructive disassembly steps. The construction method is based on an existing method that uses a liaison diagram and a hypergraph to automatically create the structure of a Petri net and extend it to include the configuration of end-of-life (EOL) options and destructive disassembly steps. The method is validated with a product comprising 54 components. A depth-first search demonstrates the applicability of the generated Petri net for identifying feasible disassembly process plans. Future research should explore the integration of economic, ecological, and circularity objectives and investigate heuristic methods to optimize DPP using large-scale Petri net models.
Brunnenkant et al. (2026) studied this question.