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The disassembly line balancing (DLB) problem assigns the set of tasks to each workstation for each product to be disassembled and aims at attaining several objectives, such as minimising the number of workstations, ensuring similar idle time at each workstation and removing hazardous parts/highly demanded components at the earliest moments possible. Over the past two decades, the DLB problem and its variants have grown ever more popular for researchers and practitioners of environmentally conscious manufacturing. Yet, the problem characteristics and assumptions vary widely and there is no literature review to classify the existing articles accordingly. Hence, a comprehensive literature review of recent and state-of-the-art papers is vital to draw a framework of the past, and to shed light on future directions. To do so, 116 studies published in proceedings and journals since 1999 are selected and reviewed. The papers are then analysed and categorised to construct a useful foundation of past research. Finally, trends and gaps in the literature are identified to clarify and to suggest future research opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assembly line worker assignment and balancing problem type-II (ALWABP-2) occurs when workers and tasks (where task times depend on workers’ skills) are to be simultaneously assigned to a fixed number of workstations with the goal of minimising the cycle time. In this study, a two-phase variable neighbourhood search (VNS) algorithm is proposed to solve the ALWABP-2 due to the NP-hard nature of this problem. In the first phase of the algorithm, a VNS approach is applied to assign tasks to workstations with the aim of minimising the cycle time while in the second phase, a variable neighbourhood descent method is applied to assign workers to workstations. The performance of the proposed algorithm is tested on well-known benchmark instances. In addition, the proposed algorithm has been used to solve a real case study from a consumer electronics company that manufactures LCD TVs. The results show that the algorithm is superior to the methods reported in the literature in terms of its higher efficiency and robustness. Furthermore, the algorithm is easy to implement and significantly improves the performance of the final assembly line for the investigated LCD TV real case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a sequence-dependent disassembly line balancing problem (SDDLBP) with multiple objectives that requires the assignment of disassembly tasks to a set of ordered disassembly workstations while satisfying the disassembly precedence constraints and considering sequence-dependent part removal time increments. The four objectives to be achieved are as follows: (1) minimise the number of disassembly workstations, (2) minimise the total idle time by evenly distributing it among workstations, (3) maximise the priority of removing hazardous components as early as possible in the disassembly sequence and (4) maximise the priority of removing high demand components before low demand components. A new approach based on the tabu search (TS) algorithm is proposed to solve the SDDLBP. To the best of our knowledge, this paper investigates the first application of TS algorithm to solve the SDDLBP. Two case scenarios are considered and comparisons with ant colony optimisation and river formation dynamics approaches are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]