Energy-efficient scheduling of flexible flow shop of composite recycling

Composite recycling technologies have been developed to tackle the increasing use of composites in industry and as a result of restrictions placed on landfill disposal. Mechanical, thermal and chemical approaches are the existing main recycling techniques to recover the fibres. Some optimisation work for reducing energy consumed by above processes has also been developed. However, the resource efficiency of recycling composites at the workshop level has never been considered before. Considering the current trend of designing and optimising a system in parallel and the future needs of the composite recycling business, a flexible flow shop for carbon fibre reinforced composite recycling is modelled. Optimisation approaches based on non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) have been developed to reduce the time and energy consumed for processing composite wastes by searching for the optimal sub-lot splitting and resource scheduling plans. Case studies on different composite recycling scenarios have been conducted to prove the feasibility of the model and the developed algorithm.