A new multi-objective ant colony algorithm for solving the disassembly line balancing problem

The disassembly line is the best choice for automated disassembly of disposal products. Therefore, disassembly line should be designed and balanced so that it can work as efficiently as possible. In this paper, a mathematical model for the multi-objective disassembly line balancing problem is formalized firstly. Then, a novel multi-objective ant colony optimization (MOACO) algorithm is proposed for solving this multi-objective optimization problem. Taking into account the problem constraints, a solution construction mechanism based on the method of tasks assignment is utilized in the algorithm. Additionally, niche technology is used to embed in the updating operation to search the Pareto optimal solutions. Moreover, in order to find the Pareto optimal set, the MOACO algorithm uses the concept of Pareto dominance to dynamically filter the obtained non-dominated solution set. To validate the performance of algorithm, the proposed algorithm is measured over published results obtained from single-objective optimization approaches and compared with multi-objective ACO algorithm based on uniform design. The experimental results show that the proposed MOACO is well suited to multi-objective optimization in disassembly line balancing.