The key theme of this research document is the negative impact of an increasingly expanding motor vehicle industry. The urban infrastructure and dependence on individual transportation has become an integral part of everyday life for many. Continual growth in the numbers of new automobiles within cities has resulted in the disposal of old and broken (end-of-life) automobiles. This dissertation investigates the potential of industrial architecture in assisting with the regulation of waste management through adaptive re-use of lost spaces and materials. The main objectives include recycling, recycling-awareness and education, re-use of materials, architecture promoting low embodied energy products, the production of energy and social consolidation. Due to the high embodied energy of automobiles, the different range of materials used and the availability of discarded automobiles found within the surrounding industrial area of Pretoria West, a study of the recycling of automobiles will form the central theme for this dissertation. A Vehicle Disassembly Plant, which would be located within the Pretoria West Industrial Area – West of the City of Tshwane CBD, would, by means of waste management, form the basis of the architectural intervention. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Architecture / unrestricted

In this thesis, we consider a Disassembly Line Balancing Problem (DLBP) with fixed number of workstations. We aim to maximize the total value of the recovered parts. We assume that there is a limited supply for the products to be disassembled. Different components can be obtained by disassembling different units of the product. Our aim is to assign the tasks to the workstations of the disassembly line so as to maximize the total value of the recovered parts. We present several upper and one lower bounding procedure. The results of our computational study have revealed the satisfactory behavior of our bounding mechanisms.