A Fuzzy AHP and PROMETHEE method-based heuristic for disassembly line balancing problems

Nowadays, new products have been introduced in the market at an ever increasing pace due to rapid technology advancement. Consequently, products are becoming outdated and discarded faster than ever before. Since the demand for new solutions to economically deal with such outdated products begun to rise, the disassembly line has emerged as a viable solution to this problem. The disassembly line has been considered as a viable choice for automated disassembly of returned products. The problem of sequence generation in disassembly is complex due to its NP-Hard nature and therefore the heuristically solutions are most preferable for these types of problems. In this paper, a heuristic has been proposed to assign the disassembly tasks/parts to the work stations under its precedence constraints. It incorporates Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (Fuzzy AHP) and PROMETHEE method for the selection of tasks for assignment to the disassembly line. The Fuzzy AHP has been used to find the relative importance of each criteria and PROMETHEE method has been used for prioritising the tasks for assignment. The proposed heuristics has been illustrated with an example and the results have been compared to the heuristic proposed by McGovern and Gupta. The proposed heuristic performs well and has shown improvements in terms of cycle time and idle time of the workstations.