Improved Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm for Solving a Single-Objective Sequence-dependent Disassembly Line Balancing Problem

The circular economy follows the principle of reducing resource usage and energy consumption, reusing usable resources including subassemblies and components in discarded or used products, and recycling usable materials. It is guided by saving resources, improving the utilization rate of resources, reducing pollution, and protecting an ecological environment. Effective product disassembly planning methods can improve recovery efficiency and promote the circular economy. However, the existing studies pay little attention to sequential dependency disassembly, which makes it difficult to implement the existing planning methods under the constraints of limited disassembly methods and tools. In this paper, a single-objective sequence-dependent disassembly line balancing problem (SDLB) is studied. This problem requires that disassembly tasks are assigned to a group of orderly disassembly workstations to obtain the near optimal solution while meeting a disassembly priority constraint. Because solution complexity increases with the number of parts in a product, an improved artificial bee colony method (IABC) is proposed to solve the problem. Through experiments and compared with a genetic algorithm, the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified.