Disassembly line optimization with reinforcement learning

As the environmental aspects become increasingly important, the disassembly problems have become the researcher’s focus. Multiple criteria do not enable finding a general optimization method for the topic, but some heuristics and classical formulations provide effective solutions. By highlighting that disassembly problems are not the straight inverses of assembly problems and the conditions are not standard, disassembly optimization solutions require human control and supervision. Considering that Reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve complex optimization problems, we developed an RL-based solution for a fully formalized disassembly problem. There were known successful implementations of RL-based optimizers. But we integrated a novel heuristic to target a dynamically pre-filtered action space for the RL agent (dlOptRL algorithm) and hence significantly raise the efficiency of the learning path. Our algorithm belongs to the Heuristically Accelerated Reinforcement Learning (HARL) method class. We demonstrated its applicability in two use cases, but our approach can also be easily adapted for other problem types. Our article gives a detailed overview of disassembly problems and their formulation, the general RL framework and especially Q-learning techniques, and a perfect example of extending RL learning with a built-in heuristic.