Disassembly planning is essential to justify end-of-life recycling of industrial products, its goal being an optimal tradeoff between process cost and materia! recoverable value. A framework for solving the computer-aided disassembly planning problem is proposed in this paper. The problem is defined as the constrained maximization of a profit rate function of time, which can be calculated for any candidate sequence of dismantling operations. Some properties of the objective function are highlighted to guide the search for an optimal plan, by either heuristic search or iterative improvement of a feasible initial solution.