Multicriteria optimization model for end-of-life vehicles' recycling network

Abstract

A growing ecological awareness in modern societies, legal regulations aiming at a reduction of waste storage and economic benefi ts that we can have from recycling of used products led to a situation that the creation of recycling networks has become an important issue, particularly in developed countries. The paper presents issues related to the design of recycling network whose purpose is to collect from the last owner, dismantle, and properly recover end-of-life vehicles. Creating recycling network has become an indispensable element that accompanies the development of the automotive industry. Its functioning is within the realm of interest of a variety of government agendas, companies participating in the network, vehicle manufacturers, and vehicle end-users. The interests of these groups need to be considered when deciding about the network organization. Very often, these interests are divergent and it is extremely diffi cult to take into account the preferences of all the interested parties. In such a case, making right decisions is aided by multicriteria decision support tools. The proposed decision support tools consist in formulating a research problem in the mathematical language in the form of an optimization task related to the determining of a recycling network entity location. The selection of the optimum locations of the individual recycling network entities will depend on the preferences of the decision-maker and the resources at the decision-maker's disposal as well as the conditions that the network must meet. The paper presents a bi-criteria model of network entity location that takes into account the preferences of the vehicle owners and network participants. A mathematical formulation of the optimization task has been presented, including the objective functions and limitations that the solutions have to comply with. Then, the model was used for the network optimization in Poland. © 2013 WIT Press.