Abstract: The increasing environment and resource problems, enhanced public environmental awareness, coupled with tremendous economic interests, force manufacturers to recycle and reuse the sharp growth of discarded products for reserving natural resources and reducing environmental pollution. Disassembly is one of the key processes in product recovery, which directly affects the benefit of remanufacturingand the harmful degree on environment. However, the unbalanced phenomenon often occurs when the tasks are distributed across the workstations in the process of disassembly, which affects the disassembly efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, to deal with returned products disassembled on the disassembly line with fixed number of workstations, a disassembly line balancing problem of type II (DLBP-II) is presented to minimize the cycle time and ensure the balance of workloads among workstations. Then a parallel dynamic neighborhood depth search (PDNDS) algorithm was proposed to solve it. In the PDNDS, two sets of neighborhood structure are constructed. A dynamic search strategy is applied to realize parallel search of the solutions. The solution can jump out of the local optimum rapidly by using the threshold value mechanism. During the adjustment of cycle time, a bound strategy based on binary search is introduced to accelerate the search speed. Finally,the validity of the constructed model and the superiority of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated by benchmark instances.

Key words: disassembly line, disassembly line balancing problem, parallel dynamic neighborhood depth search, type II