A piecewise linear model for stochastic disassembly line balancing

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.07.895

Disassembly lines are used so as to recover both economic and ecological value residing in collected end-of-life products while meeting environmental legislation. Due to the nature of the disassembly operations, disassembly tasks exhibit higher levels of uncertainty. So as to incorporate the variability in task times while designing disassembly lines, this paper deals with the stochastic disassembly line balancing problem with the objective of minimizing the number of stations. Task times are assumed to be normally distributed random variables with known means and standard deviations. A chance-constrained piecewise-linear mixed integer programming model is proposed. The computational experiments using the cell phone problem demonstrate that the proposed model can yield on average 2% improvements compared to a stochastic station oriented ranked positional heuristic.