Optimizing Reverse Logistics Network for End-of-Life Electrical Appliances

When the electrical appliances such as TVs and refrigerators become obsolete, they must be collected to the recycling centers to avoid environmental damages. The obsolete home appliances are first moved to the regional collection point; and then transported to one of the recycling centers. Each recycling center has a limited capacity; and some recycling centers can process only certain types of products. For given locations of the existing collection points and recycling centers, optimally assigning the obsolete home appliances of each type from each collection point to the recycling centers can significantly reduce the total transportation cost. We formulate this problem as an LP problem. We also present an approach to determine the locations of additional recycling centers in order to alleviate the over-utilization of the current recycling centers.