An integrated multi-stage vehicle routing and mixed-model job-shop-type robotic disassembly sequence scheduling problem for e-waste management system

Abstract

ABSTRACT The rapid development of technology has reduced the longevity of electronic products; this can be led to increase generation of electronic and electrical waste worldwide. The protection of the environment and the optimum use of non-renewable resources should be our priority in today's world. Therefore, e-waste management involves two crucial processes of the collection and recovery of e-waste that ought to be considered in an e-waste management. Thus, this paper presents a new integrated multi-stage model for a comprehensive e-waste management system in three levels of vehicle routing, disassembly sequence scheduling, and allocation of vehicles for transporting components. This model minimizes three objectives of total costs of collocation and transportation, total pollution emissions by trucks and vehicles, and carbon footprint by robots, and the total cost of disassembling products simultaneously. Moreover, our study is novel in some aspects such as integrated decisions related to vehicle routing and disassembly sequence scheduling, compatible truck for collecting e-waste, mixed-model disassembly by robots, and job-shop-type disassembly layout. Afterwards, several numerical examples are presented in different scales to examine the model's efficiency. An exact and meta-heuristic method are applied to solve the model. Finally, by changing some parameters, the useful sensitivity analysis is presented.