Geodesy

Remanufacturing

Algorithm

Benchmark (surveying)

Engineering

Reliability engineering

Operating system

Computer science

Mathematical optimization

Manufacturing engineering

Mechanical engineering

Operations research

Mathematics

Geography

Political science

Industrial engineering

Workstation

Geometry

Assembly line

Interdependence

Line (geometry)

Journal of Cleaner Production

With the rapid technology advancement and market changes products are becoming outdated and subsequently discarded faster than ever before. As a result, recovery, recycling, and remanufacturing of end-of-life products are gaining more attention. Disassembly is indispensable to recycle and remanufacture end-of-life products, and a disassembly line is an efficient way to achieve it. A disassembly line balancing problem aims at optimizing the disassembly sequences in which the disassembly times of workstations are approximately equal and approaching the cycle time. However, in addition to line balancing assigning disassembly tasks to workstations needs to consider other factors, such as how to recover valuable components as fast as possible and reduce undesirable impacts on the environment as much as possible. This work aims at addressing a disassembly line balancing problem with multiple objectives, including economic and environmental factors and disassembly line efficiency. A three-phased methodology is proposed to solve this problem. The proposed method not only enables the consideration of objectives with interdependent weights in multi-criteria decision making but effectively generates a good enough trade-off disassembly solution using a 2-optimal algorithm. The proposed approach is tested on a benchmark and compared with three other methods. Experiment results are shown to verify its performance.

Disassembly line balancing problem using interdependent weights-based multi-criteria decision making and 2-Optimal algorithm