Abstract
Due to increasing environmental concerns, manufacturers are forced to take back their products at the end of products’ useful functional life. Manufacturers need to arrange how to recover product components and subassemblies for reuse, remanufacture, and recycle to extend the life of materials in use and reduce the disposal volume. However, disassembly is the first essential step on product recovery. The disassembly line balancing problem (DLBP) is the process of allocating a set of disassembly tasks to an ordered sequence of workstations in such a way that optimizes performance (e.g., number of stations, hazardous components number, cycle time and work load). Therefore, in this study, a mathematical model is presented for the DLBP by considering resource and labor constraints. Utilizing a transformed AND/OR Graph (TAOG) as the main input is to ensure the feasibility of the precedence relations among the tasks. The objective of this model is to minimize the number of labors used under determined cycle time. This research proposed a three-phase heuristic adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA) to optimize the labors number in the disassembly line. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior to the existing approaches for medium and large scale in DLBPs.