An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to Disassembly Planning

This paper proposes an ant colony optimization approach to disassembly planning. The mechanism of ant colony optimization in disassembly planning is discussed, and the objectives to be optimized in disassembly planning are introduced. For more effective search for feasible non-dominated solutions, a multi-objective searching algorithm with uniform design is investigated to guide the ants searching the routes along the uniformly scattered directions toward Pareto frontier, based on this searching algorithm, an ant colony optimization approach to disassembly planning is developed. The results of the case study are given to verify the proposed approach.