Location-routing optimization when renting social vehicles in a two-stage e-waste recycling network

Abstract

E-waste recycling has been a hot topic in recent years. The low efficiency and high-operation cost of recycling make it more important to build perfect e-waste recycling networks. To hedge against the limitation of vehicle resources being often neglected in existing research, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model of e-waste recycling by renting idle social vehicles. In the model, both decisions made on the location selection of recycling sites and vehicle routings satisfying all of the demand nodes over the network within time windows are required to minimize the total operating cost. An improved genetic algorithm and heuristic algorithm are designed to solve the model, and numerical experiments are produced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms.