Constraint-based simulated annealing (CBSA) approach to solve the disassembly scheduling problem

Globalization, coupled with environmental requirements, has spearheaded new levels of requirements for product end-of-life, the last phase of product lifecycle management especially for product remanufacturing and recycling which involves product disassembly to retrieve the desired parts and subassemblies. Selection of optimal disassembly schedule is a major challenge for remanufacturing and recycling industries as it directly affects the inventory of the manufacturing unit and influences the final product cost. This paper proposes a constraint-based simulated annealing (CBSA) algorithm methodology to determine the ordering and disassembly schedule to minimize inventory level for products with general assembly product structure, i.e., taking into consideration part commonalities. The proposed CBSA algorithm uses the constraint-based genetic operators integrated with the simulated annealing (SA) approach that makes the algorithm more search exploratory (guarantee the optimal or near-optimal solution) and converge efficiently to the optimal solutions (less time-consuming). The proposed algorithm has higher likelihood of avoiding local optima as compared with standard SA and genetic algorithms. This is achieved by exploring a population of points, rather than a single point in the solution space. The proposed methodology is validated using a numerical case study for disassembly scheduling problem with part commonality.