Preliminary evaluation of artificial bee colony algorithm when applied to multi objective partial disassembly planning

The aim of this study is the first evaluation of the Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm when applied to multi objective partial disassembly planning. Several methodologies have been proposed by academic and industrial researchers for developing and implementing automated disassembly planning and the research literature is very extensive. In particular, nature-inspired heuristic techniques seem to be very promising and performing well to optimize the disassembly planning problem, among them, the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) approach, which has not yet been tested. The authors propose the implementation of a discrete ABC algorithm to plan the disassembly sequence of products, following these steps: matrix system modelling, multi-objective function and solution search with an ABC algorithm. In particular the study provides details of the algorithm and heuristic rules, inspired by the behaviour of bees during food search, which is a very efficient natural process. Two case studies have been selected and reported to test the efficiency of the algorithm, while further research is required to compare ABC to other efficient heuristics.