The Disassembly Line: Balancing and Modeling provides in-depth information on this complex process essential to remanufacturing, recycling, and environmentally conscious manufacturing. This pioneering work offers efficient techniques required to solve problems involving the number of workstations required and the disassembly sequencing of end-of-life products on the disassembly line.

In this book, the disassembly line balancing problem (DLBP) is described, defined mathematically, and illustrated by case studies. Combinatorial optimization methodologies are presented as solutions to the DLBP.

Coverage includes:

• Graphical representations of products to be disassembled
• Computational complexity of combinatorial problems
• Description of the disassembly line and the mathematical model
• Computational complexity of the DLBP
• Combinatorial optimization searches
• Experimental instances
• Analytical methodologies
• Exhaustive search
• Genetic algorithm
• Ant colony optimization
• Greedy algorithm
• Greedy/adjacent element hill climbing hybrid
• Greedy/2-opt hybrid
• H-K heuristic
• Quantitative and qualitative comparative analysis

This authoritative volume also covers product planning, line and facility design, sequencing and scheduling, inventory, just in time, revenue, and unbalanced lines.