A solution approach based on beam search algorithm for disassembly line balancing problem

The disassembly line balancing (DLB) problem is the process of allocating a set of disassembly tasks to an ordered sequence of workstations in such a way that optimizes some performance measures (e.g., cycle time, number of stations). Since DLB problems belong to the class of NP hard, many heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms are applied to cope with the complexity of the DLB problems in order to obtain acceptable solutions in a reasonable amount of time. In this study, a beam search (BS) based approach for the DLB problem is proposed. Minimization of number of workstations is used as the performance measure. The proposed algorithm is compared with the optimal solutions of well-known real cases and generated test problems. The results indicate that the proposed approach based on BS is a very competitive and promising tool for further researches. (C) 2016 The Society of Manufacturing Engineers. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.