A novel constraint programming and simulated annealing for disassembly line balancing problem with AND/OR precedence and sequence dependent setup times

Abstract

This study considers recycling the products to reuse or reproduce the precious parts of these products to provide environmental sustainability and for companies to adapt to competitive conditions. These recycling processes include the dismantling of the products using the disassembly lines. Disassembly line balancing problems contribute to these processes by ensuring that products are disassembled efficiently and at minimum cost. Therefore, these problems have started to attract more attention in the literature. This study considers the disassembly line balancing problem, with sequence-dependent setup time and complex AND/OR precedence relations between tasks. The managerial impacts highlighted by the proposed problem are of great importance both from environmental and industrial sustainability due to the recycling process of the life-threatening wastes. The study aims to disassemble the products using a minimum number of workstations. Mixed-integer linear programming and constraint programming models have been developed for the considered problem in question. As far as is known, the sequence-dependent disassembly line balancing problem, which has complex precedence relations, has not been studied in the literature before, and the constraint programming model developed is also novel. The study also compares the constraint programming model with/without an initial solution. In addition, a simulated annealing metaheuristic is proposed to solve the problem, and its results are compared with the results of the models. Setup times were generated for well-known instances obtained from the literature. The results obtained using these instances showed that the constraint programming model successfully solved the problem under consideration.