Multi-objective disassembly line optimization with collaborative robots

Disassembly is a crucial phase in remanufacturing and recycling, gaining increasing attention over the past decades due to its importance in sustainable resource management. While various decision-making challenges within the disassembly process have been studied, we focus on two closely related problems: the disassembly sequencing problem and the disassembly line balancing problem, specifically in the context of human-robot collaboration. We consider a bi-objective problem of total time-dependent cost minimization and workload balancing between activated workstations. The goal is to identify the best disassembly task sequence and the optimal assignment of tasks to operators and workstations in order to meet the problem’s objectives. To overcome these challenges, we formulate the problem as a mixed integer program and compare the ϵ-constraint and weighted sum methods to generate Pareto fronts. Computational experiments conducted on real-world end-of-life product structures validate the proposed model’s efficiency on small and medium-scale structures.