A Hybrid Heuristic Approach for Disassembly/Recycle Applications

Over the past several years, heuristic methods are often used to find optimal solution(s) of disassembly/recycle sequencing problem, for it is a NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed research, first, we present a method: product disassembly sequence planning problem could map onto a problem of searching the optimal tour in the disassembly feasibility information graph (DFIG). Then a genetic algorithm is proposed to search the optimal solution of disassembly/recycle problem. Optimization objective is the performance of a solution, which is mainly related with three factors: disassembling process, environment impact and disassembly & recycle line. In particular, scheduling disassembly & recycle line is also a NP-hard problem. Therefore, a heuristic genetic operator, combined with disassembly & recycle processes tree, is also presented to schedule the disassembly & recycle line