Application and planning of an energy-oriented stochastic disassembly line balancing problem

Abstract

End-of-life (EOL) products are getting more and more attention as a result of the rapid decline in environmental resources and the dramatic rise in population at the moment. Disassembly is a crucial step in the reuse of EOL products. However, the disassembly process for EOL products is highly uncertain, and the disassembly planning method may not produce the anticipated outcomes in actual implementation. Based on the physical nature of the product disassembly process with multiple uncertain variables, certainty disassembly cannot adequately characterize the uncertain variables effectively. Uncertainty disassembly takes into account the changes in parts caused by product use, such as wear and corrosion, which can better coordinate the arrangement of disassembly tasks and better match the actual remanufacturing process. After analysis, it was found that most of studies on uncertain disassembly focus on the economic efficiency perspective and lack of energy consumption considerations. For the gaps in the current study, this paper proposes a stochastic energy consumption disassembly line balance problem (SEDLBP) and constructs a mathematical model of SEDLBP based on the disassembly of spatial interference matrix, In this model, the energy consumption generated by the disassembly operation and workstation standby is not a constant value but is generated stochastically in a uniformly distributed interval. In addition, an improved social engineering optimization algorithm that incorporates stochastic simulation (SSEO) is proposed in this paper to effectively address the issue. The incorporation of swap operators and swap sequences in SSEO makes it possible to solve discrete optimization problems efficiently. A comparison of a case study with some well-tested intelligent algorithms demonstrates the efficacy of the solutions produced by the proposed SSEO.