Design of a recovery network for WEEE collection: the case of Galicia, Spain

Abstract

This research aims to optimize the design of the reverse logistic network for the collection of Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), in the Spanish region of Galicia. As a basis for our study a three-phase hierarchical approach is proposed. In the first phase a facility location problem is formulated and solved by means of a mixed integer linear programming; in the second phase a new integer programming formulation for the corresponding heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem is presented, and a savings-based heuristic algorithm is developed to efficiently solve the related collection routing problems; in the third phase a simulation study is performed on the collection routes in order to assess the overall performance of the recovery system. The results show a good performance of the proposed procedure, and an improved configuration of the recovery network compared to the one currently in use (particularly transportation costs are reduced by 29.2%).

Keywords:

• reverse logistics
• location
• vehicle routeing
• simulation
• heuristics
• optimization

Acknowledgements

This research has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant MEC-DPI2007-65827-C02-01, Tecnológico de Monterrey Research Fund CAT 128, and by PROMEP scholarship UAT-265. We are very grateful to the associate editor and the anonymous referees for their constructive comments, which improved both the content as well as the presentation of the paper.