A PROMETHEE Method Based Heuristic for Disassembly Line Balancing Problem

Disassembly of discarded products takes place in the process of remanufacturing, recycling, and disposal. The disassembly lines have been taken as available choice for automated disassembly; therefore, it has become essential that it be designed and balanced to work efficiently. The multi-objective disassembly line balancing problem seeks to find a disassembly sequence which provides a feasible disassembly sequence, minimizes the number of workstations and idle time, and balances the line for the disassembly of post consumed product by considering the environment effects. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making technique based heuristic for assigning the disassembly tasks to the workstations. In the proposed heuristic, the PROMETHEE method is used for prioritizing the tasks to be assigned. The tasks are assigned to the disassembly workstations according to their priority rank and precedence relations. The proposed heuristic is illustrated with an example, and the results show that substantial improvement in the performance is achieved compared with other heuristics.