Capacitated disassembly scheduling with parts commonality and start-up cost and its industrial application

Abstract

This paper discusses the capacitated disassembly scheduling with parts commonality and start-up cost, which has broad applications in remanufacturing and many other production systems. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer programming model. A Lagrangian heuristic is developed, where the lower bound problem reduces to a linear model, and the upper bound can be obtained with a two-stage procedure in polynomial time. The algorithm is tested on randomly generated problems. The results reveal that the approach outperforms CPLEX significantly for all the test instances, and for real-scale problem it provides sufficiently good solutions within acceptable time. Sensitivity studies on capacity, parts commonality and start-up cost are also conducted, which provide some useful insights for industrial managers. Moreover, a real-world case from a valve disassembly factory is studied, which illustrates the application of the proposed approach and gives managerial insights. Finally, conclusions are drawn and some potential extensions are discussed.

Keywords:

• capacitated disassembly scheduling
• parts commonality
• start-up cost
• case study

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ms. Xiaofang Wang (Senior engineer, Tsinghua University, P.R. China) for providing the explosion diagram of the valve. The authors acknowledge the supports of National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant No. 71371106) and State Key Program of National Natural Science of China (grant No. 71332005), for Zhihai Zhang. The authors also thank the three referees for their insightful comments.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71071084], [grant number 71371106]; State Key Program of National Natural Science of China [grant number 71332005].