On the end-of-life state oriented multi-objective disassembly line balancing problem

Abstract

The biggest difference between a disassembly line and an assembly line is that there are many uncertainties in structure and quality of the disassembled products in a disassembly line. The disassembly line balancing problem, considering the effect of end-of-life states caused by the uncertainty of the structure or the quality of the disassembled products, is addressed in this paper. A multi-objective mathematical model for the addressed problem is built with three optimization goals: minimizing the number of workstations, minimizing the idle index and minimizing the number of resources. Then a multi-objective hybrid migrating birds optimization algorithm is proposed, which uses a greedy random search operation based on embedding mechanism to generate neighborhood individuals. To avoid the problem of easily being trapped into a local optimum by a basic migrating birds optimization algorithm, a reset mechanism based on simulated annealing operation is set up to accept other solutions with a certain probability, so that the algorithm can escape out of a local optimum. By solving disassembly examples of different scales in the literature and comparing with the existing algorithms, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed multi-objective hybrid migrating birds optimization algorithm is validated. Finally, the proposed model and algorithm are applied to solving two disassembly instances, and the solving results are compared with the single-objective optimal solution solved by LINGO 11.0 solver and the basic migrating birds optimization algorithm to further identify the performance of the proposed algorithm.