Multi-Period Network Design Problem in Regional Hazardous Waste Management Systems

The management of hazardous wastes in regions is required to design a multi-echelon network with multiple facilities including recycling, treatment and disposal centers servicing the transportation, recycling, treatment and disposal procedures of hazardous wastes and waste residues. The multi-period network design problem within is to determine the location of waste facilities and allocation/transportation of wastes/residues in each period during the planning horizon, such that the total cost and total risk in the location and transportation procedures are minimized. With consideration of the life cycle capacity of disposal centers, we formulate the problem as a bi-objective mixed integer linear programming model in which a unified modeling strategy is designed to describe the closing of existing waste facilities and the opening of new waste facilities. By exploiting the characteristics of the proposed model, an augmented ε-constraint algorithm is developed to solve the model and find highly qualified representative non-dominated solutions. Finally, computational results of a realistic case demonstrate that our algorithm can identify obviously distinct and uniformly distributed representative non-dominated solutions within reasonable time, revealing the trade-off between the total cost and total risk objectives efficiently. Meanwhile, the multi-period network design optimization is superior to the single-period optimization in terms of the objective quality.