The meta-heuristic method based cutting planning for the decommissioning of spallation target in China initiative accelerator driven subcritical system

•The decommissioning of high power spallation target in CiADS has been discussed.•The optimization method for the cutting planning operation has been developed.•The genetic algorithm has been employed to select the appropriate voxel grids for the cutting process.•The meta-heuristic method based cutting planning operation can meet the decommissioned requirements.