Modeling and Balancing for Disassembly Lines Considering Workers With Different Efficiencies

To achieve sustainable manufacturing of large-scale end-of-life products, disassembly for recycling and remanufacturing has been widely adopted by industries. Disassembly line balancing becomes an important and challenging issue. The disassembly efficiencies of workers are different in the actual disassembly line due to some factors, including disassembly environment, skill level, work enthusiasm, etc. However, efficiency differences are often ignored in previous studies, which ultimately lead to unbalanced workloads among stations. Therefore, this article establishes a disassembly line balancing model that considers workers with different efficiencies and introduces the bucket brigade model into the disassembly line. Its optimization objectives include workload smoothness, cost of workers, disassembly risk, and disassembly demand. To obtain high-quality solutions, a discrete flower pollination algorithm based on problem characteristics is proposed. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparing it with 11 algorithms. Finally, the proposed model and algorithm are applied to an actual television disassembly case considering workers with different efficiencies, and provide decision makers with multiple disassembly schemes.