Artificial bee colony algorithm for solving sequence-dependent disassembly line balancing problem

•This is the first adaptation of artificial bee colony algorithm to solve the SDDLBP.•The proposed algorithm is very easy to implement.•The algorithm was thoroughly tested on small and large sized instances.•Comparison with six other algorithms proves the superiority of the proposed method.•The algorithm provides near optimal solution for this NP-complete problem.

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 optimizing the effectiveness of several measures. Since the complexity of SDDLBP increases with the number of parts of the product, an efficient methodology based on artificial bee colony (ABC) is proposed to solve the SDDLBP. ABC is an optimization technique which is inspired by the behavior of honey bees. The performance of the proposed algorithm was tested against six other algorithms. The results show that the proposed ABC algorithm performs well and is superior to the other six algorithms in terms of the objective values performance.