A DEMATEL-Based Disassembly Line Balancing Heuristic

Abstract

Circular economy has emerged as a response to increasing environmental problems. As opposed to linear economy, circular economy aims at the preservation of energy, material, and labor contents of used products. A critical process in circular economy is product recovery which involves the recovery of materials or components from returned products through various recovery options including recycling, refurbishing, and remanufacturing. All recovery options require some level of disassembly and disassembly operations that are generally carried out in a disassembly line. Like assembly lines, disassembly lines must be balanced in order to ensure the effective operation of the line. Mathematical programming techniques, metaheuristics, and various heuristic procedures were employed in order to solve different types of disassembly line balancing problem (DLBP). However, the use of multi-attribute decision making techniques is limited to few studies. In this study, we propose a DEMATEL-based disassembly line balancing approach which does not require extensive knowledge in operations research and computer programming. A solution can be obtained by carrying out basic matrix operations and following the steps of the approach. Two numerical examples are also provided in order to present the applicability of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the proposed approach presents a satisfactory performance compared to the previously proposed approaches.