Hybrid Artificial Bee Colony For U-Shaped Disassembly Line Balancing Problem

The way of disposing EOL products has attracted more attention with the shortage of resources and the soaring environmental pollution. Disassembly not only can achieve resources re-used, but also relieve the environmental pressure by the accumulation of EOL products. According to statistics, the number of scrapped cars will reach 9 to 12 million in China and increase to 12 to 16 million by 2020. They will produce a great market value if these resources can be effectively recycled. Disassembly is an effective method for recycling. To promote the industrialization of disassembly, reasonable disassembly line layout and disassembly process planning is indispensable Therefore, a u-shaped disassembly line layout was proposed based on the concept of lean production. The main contents are as follows:1) The mathematical model of u-shaped disassembly line balancing problem with working time deterministic was established by the study of straight line layout related knowledge and combining with u-shaped layout features.2) A hybrid Artificial bee colony algorithm was proposed by employed bees’and onlooker bees own learning and scout bees global learning making up the simple searching methods and falling into local optima easily of the standard Artificial bee colony. At the same time, an algorithm flow was designed for solving discrete optimization problem.3) Multi-objective goals was reduced to a single goal by weighted sum method and a punishment was obtained while a index exceeded a preset value. The value of each solution could be evaluated visually and a favorable condition would be provided for bees to select solutions quickly.4) The ability of the proposed algorithm was demonstrated by the contrast of the solving results of the benchmark and simplify disassembly models from Particle swarm optimization and Ant colony optimization. And u-shaped layout was more applied to practical production.5) Considering the uncertainty of working time, a u-shaped disassembly line balancing problem with stochastic working time was presented. The rules of disassembly line optimization with stochastic working time were summarized by the result of examples tested. Finally, the proposed algorithm was applied to the practical disassembly line optimization.