An improved gravitational search algorithm for profit-oriented partial disassembly line balancing problem

Disassembly is indispensable to recycle and remanufacture end-of-life products, and a disassembly line-balancing problem (DLBP) is studied frequently. Recent research on disassembly lines has focused on a complete disassembly for optimising the balancing ability of lines. However, a partial disassembly process is widely applied in the current industry practice, which aims at reusing valuable components and maximising the profit (or minimising the cost). In this paper, we consider a profit-oriented partial disassembly line-balancing problem (PPDLBP), and a mathematical model of this problem is established, which is to achieve the maximisation of profit for dismantling a product in DLBP. The PPDLBP is NP-complete since DLBP is proven to be a NP-complete problem, which is usually handled by a metaheuristics. Therefore, a novel efficient approach based on gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is proposed to solve the PPDLBP. GSA is an optimisation technique that is inspired by the Newtonian gravity and the laws of motion. Also, two different scale cases are used to test on the proposed algorithm, and some comparisons with the CPLEX method, particle swarm optimisation, differential evolution and artificial bee colony algorithms are presented to demonstrate the excellence of the proposed approach.