A Constrained Decomposition Grid Approach to Disassembly Line Balancing Problems

Environmental damage caused by rapidly increasing end-of-life products can be reduced if they can be properly disassembled and their parts and material can be reused/recycles. Robots can be used to increase the efficiency of a disassembly line. We can classify disassembly operations into non-destructive and destructive ones. This work presents a mathematical model of a disassembly line balancing problem (DLBP) involving both types of disassembly operations. We propose an improved constrained decomposition grid (CDG) approach to solve the model. Four types of products are disassembled by using CDG, multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGAII). The results verify CDG’s feasibility, effectiveness and better performance than its two peers’.