ABSTRACT
Product recovery is getting even more popular in reducing the environmental effects of end-of-life (EOL) products. That also provides companies an advantage to reduce the purchase costs for parts removed from EOL products. Within this context, the disassembly process of EOL products is the most important and time-consuming stage, involving considerable effort to preserve the quality of the removed parts. This chapter proposes a novel differential evolution algorithm (DEA) approach for balancing the disassembly lines where a mix of products are disassembled in an intermixed sequence. The DEA has been successfully applied to many engineering problems but its applications on operational research problems or disassembly line balancing problems, specifically, are extremely limited. The main reason behind this might be that the DEA was designed for nonlinear continuous function optimization. Therefore, this chapter contributes to the literature by demonstrating one of the preliminary applications of DEA on disassembly line balancing problems. The sequence of models on the line is not known beforehand and the aim is to maximize line efficiency as an ultimate objective. The running mechanism of the proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical examples; computational tests are conducted to measure the performance of the proposed approach. Results indicate that the proposed DEA approach shows a very promising performance.
