Disassembly and Assembly Line Optimization Considering Workspace Utilization

As technologies advance rapidly, increasing the manufacturing workstation efficiency is essential for boosting productivity and cutting costs. To address it, researchers and practitioners usually focus on factors such as labor distribution, human-machine collaboration, or task scheduling, but with limited consideration in the utilization of workstation space. For manufacturing workstations with a specified size, the dimensions of the components determine the allocation of tasks. Effectively utilizing the idle space of workstations can significantly improve manufacturing productivity, reduce resource waste, and enhance the reliability and capacity of production lines. This work proposes an innovative scheme aiming at optimizing and facilitating manufacturing efficiency through the leverage of idle space in disassembly and assembly lines. An improved advantage actorcritic algorithm is proposed to positively solve this optimization problem by incorporating a greedy strategy. The greedy strategy enables the algorithm to converge more quickly, thereby reducing computation time and resource consumption. Comparative experiments and analysis with other optimization methods demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed solution in both solution accuracy and efficiency.