The optimization of vehicles recycling facility location

Today the issue of the organization of end-of-life vehicle recycling network has become one of the essential elements related to the car manufacturing industry, particularly in developed economies. The formation of a recycling network should be planned and organized carefully to ensure its efficiency and resource optimization. That is why the creation of the network requires appropriate tools that will allow a proper location of the recycling network structural elements. Moreover, while designing a vehicle recycling network one needs to take many technical, organizational, legal and economic factors into account. Thanks to this, the process of developing of the network or locating new facilities will ensure maximum benefits equally for the network participants, the end-of-life vehicle owners and other stakeholders. In this paper an example of a decision support model whose task is to optimize the location for vehicles recycling facilities has been presented. Upon determining of the system elements, its structure has been mapped providing correlations among the entities based on material flow and cost analysis. The research problem has been formulated based on the identification of the characteristics of the main facilities (return stations, dismantlers and industrial shredders) and requirements set by different stakeholders. The model description contains a system of constraints along with boundary conditions that generate a set of admissible decisions as well as the objective function that constitutes the basis for the evaluation of the proposed solutions. In the end optimization task was formulated and presented.