A Pareto-based hybrid genetic simulated annealing algorithm for multi-objective hybrid production line balancing problem considering disassembly and assembly

Most existing studies about line balancing problems mainly focus on disassembly and assembly separately, which rarely integrate these two modes into a system. However, as critical activities in the remanufacturing field, assembly and disassembly share many similarities, such as working tools and processing sequence. Thus, this paper proposes a multi-objective hybrid production line balancing problem with a fixed number of workstations (HPLBP-FNW) considering disassembly and assembly to optimise cycle time, total cost, and workload smoothness simultaneously. And a novel Pareto-based hybrid genetic simulated annealing algorithm (PB-HGSA) is designed to solve it. In PB-HGSA, the two-point crossover and hybrid mutation operator are proposed to produce potential non-dominated solutions (NDSs). Then, a local search method based on a parallel simulated annealing algorithm is designed for providing a depth search around the NDSs to balance the global and local search ability. Numerical results by comparing PB-HGSA with the well-known algorithms verify the effectiveness of PB-HGSA in solving HPLBP-FNW. Moreover, the managerial insights based on a case study are given to inspire enterprise companies to consider hybrid production line in the remanufacturing process, which is beneficial to reduce the cycle time and total cost and improve the service life of the equipment.