Stochastic multi-product disassembly sequence planning

Remanufacturing is an efficient approach to recycle end-of-life (EOL) product, where disassembly is a critical step. Disassembly sequence planning problems aim at determining a sequence of disassembly operations to optimize some specified criteria. This work considers multiple EOL products that need to be disassembled in a planning horizon. It proposes a stochastic profit-oriented multi-product disassembly sequence planning problem for the first time, where some uncertainties during a disassembly process are considered. To solve it, an enhanced equilibrium optimizer integrated with a stochastic simulation approach is developed. A double-link string is applied to represent a solution. A decoding approach is developed to convert it to a feasible solution. Then, a local-best search approach is designed to search the promising regions. Besides, a stochastic simulation method is adopted to measure the feasibility and performance of the obtained solutions. Through experiments on some real cases and comparisons with three competitive approaches, the effectiveness of the developed method in addressing the proposed problem is validated.