Joint Industrial Waste Recycling and Disposal Mechanism in Multiple Plants Settings

This research aims at the study of planning of waste disposal and recycling operations. Industrial wastes are produced during many manufacturing processes. Some industrial waste contains valuable substances and can be extracted through specific treatment processes. Most manufacturing plants lack proper equipment for handling industrial waste and turn to recycling centers for disposal of industrial wastes. Facing with requests for waste disposal from various manufacturing plants, the operation of picking up waste from manufacturing plants and waste treatment process have to be carefully planned and coordinated. In this paper, two waste disposal models are constructed, each involving different decision makers. Various recycling strategies are explored and compared. Formulas for calculating related costs, revenue and profits are established. The goal that is to identify the optimal waste retrieval cycles with cost minimization or profit maximization as objectives. An iterative heuristic algorithm is developed to find optimal cycles. Numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance under different recycling strategies. It can also be seen that the overall system benefits from the coordinated recycling strategy. In addition, the sensitivity analysis shows that increased benefit can be obtained under the coordinated recycling strategy as the setup cost at the recycling center rises.