• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• 제12권3호
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• pp.254-263
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• 2013

Disassembly of discarded products takes place in the process of remanufacturing, recycling, and disposal. The disassembly lines have been taken as available choice for automated disassembly; therefore, it has become essential that it be designed and balanced to work efficiently. The multi-objective disassembly line balancing problem seeks to find a disassembly sequence which provides a feasible disassembly sequence, minimizes the number of workstations and idle time, and balances the line for the disassembly of post consumed product by considering the environment effects. This paper proposes a multi-criteria decision making technique based heuristic for assigning the disassembly tasks to the workstations. In the proposed heuristic, the PROMETHEE method is used for prioritizing the tasks to be assigned. The tasks are assigned to the disassembly workstations according to their priority rank and precedence relations. The proposed heuristic is illustrated with an example, and the results show that substantial improvement in the performance is achieved compared with other heuristics.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.364-373
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• 2016

Disassembly is one of the important activities in treating with the product at the End of Life time (EOL). Disassembly is defined as a systematic technique in dividing the products into its constituent elements, segments, sub-assemblies, and other groups. We concern with a Fuzzy Disassembly Line Balancing Problem (FDLBP) with multiple objectives in this article that it needs to allocation of disassembly tasks to the ordered group of disassembly Work Stations. Tasks-processing times are fuzzy numbers with triangular membership functions. Four objectives are acquired that include: (1) Minimization of number of disassembly work stations; (2) Minimization of sum of idle time periods from all work stations by ensuring from similar idle time at any work-station; (3) Maximization of preference in removal the hazardous parts at the shortest possible time; and (4) Maximization of preference in removal the high-demand parts before low-demand parts. This suggested model was initially solved by GAMS software and then using Genetic Algorithm (GA) in MATLAB software. This model has been utilized to balance automotive engine disassembly line in fuzzy environment. The fuzzy results derived from two software programs have been compared by ranking technique using mean and fuzzy dispersion with each other. The result of this comparison shows that genetic algorithm and solving it by MATLAB may be assumed as an efficient solution and effective algorithm to solve FDLBP in terms of quality of solution and determination of optimal sequence.

• Industrial Engineering and Management Systems
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• 제13권1호
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• pp.52-66
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• 2014

Promotion of a closed-loop supply chain requires disassembly systems that recycle end-of-life (EOL) assembled products. To operate the recycling disassembly system, parts selection is environmentally and economically carried out with non-destructive or destructive disassembly, and the recycling rate of the whole EOL product is determined. As the number of disassembled parts increases, the recycling rate basically increases. However, the labor cost also increases and brings lower profit, which is the difference between the recovered material prices and the disassembly costs. On the other hand, since the precedence relationships among disassembly tasks of the product also change with the parts selections, it is also required to optimize allocation of the tasks in designing a disassembly line. In addition, because information is required for such a design, the recycling rate, profit of each part and disassembly task times take precedence among the disassembly tasks. However, it is difficult to obtain that information in advance before collecting the actual EOL product. This study proposes and analyzes an optimal disassembly system design using integer programming with the environmental and economic parts selection (Igarashi et al., 2013), which harmonizes the recycling rate and profit using recyclability evaluation method (REM) developed by Hitachi, Ltd. The first stage involves optimization of environmental and economic parts selection with integer programming with ${\varepsilon}$ constraint, and the second stage involves optimization of the line balancing with integer programming in terms of minimizing the number of stations. The first and second stages are generally and mathematically formulized, and the relationships between them are analyzed in the cases of cell phones, computers and cleaners.

• 한국정밀공학회지
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• 제24권7호
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• pp.39-48
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• 2007

This paper presents a method of a line balanced assembly sequence generation based on the verification of a disassemblability and a work time. To derive the disassemblability for a part to be disassembled, first we inference collision free assembly directions by extracting separable directions fur the part. And we determine the disassemblability defined by the separability and stability cost. The separability cost represents a facility of the part disassembly operation, and the stability cost which represents a degree of the stability for the base assembly motion. Based upon the results, we propose a new approach of evaluating work time using neural networks. The proposed assembly sequence generation provides an effective means of solving the line balancing problem and gives a design guidance of planning assembly lay-out in flexible manufacturing application. Example study is given to illustrate the concepts and procedure of the proposed schemes.