Intelligent selective disassembly using the ant colony algorithm

Selective disassembly is an important issue in industrial and mechanical engineering for environmentally conscious manufacturing. This paper presents an intelligent selective disassembly approach based on ant colony algorithms, which take inspiration from the behavior of real ant colonies and are used to solve combinatorial optimization problems. For diverse assemblies, the algorithm generates different amounts of ants cooperating to find disassembly sequences for selected components, minimizing the reorientation of assemblies and removal of components. A candidate list that is composed of feasible disassembly operations, which are derived from a disassembly matrix of products, guides sequence construction in the implicit solution space and ensures the geometric feasibility of sequences. Preliminary implementation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.