Abstract
In order to recycle and dispose of all people’s expired drugs, the government should design a subsidy policy to stimulate users to return their expired drugs, and drug-stores should take the responsibility of recycling expired drugs, in other words, to be recycling stations. For this purpose it is necessary for the government to select the right recycling stations and treatment stations to optimize the expired drug recycling logistics network and minimize the total costs of recycling and disposal. This paper establishes a tri-level programming model to study how the government can optimize an expired drug recycling logistics network and the appropriate subsidy policies. Furthermore, a Hybrid Genetic Simulated Annealing Algorithm (HGSAA) is proposed to search for the optimal solution of the model. An experiment is discussed to illustrate the good quality of the recycling logistics network and government subsides obtained by the HGSAA. The HGSAA is proven to have the ability to converge on the global optimal solution, and to act as an effective algorithm for solving the optimization problem of expired drug recycling logistics network and government subsidies.
Highlights
With the development of the economy, people pay more attention to their health
We have proposed a tri-level programming model to study how the government can design recycling logistics networks and subsidy policies to recycle and treat all the expired drugs owned by the residents at the lowest cost
Combining the rapid global searching ability of a genetic algorithm (GA) and the local searching ability of Simulated annealing algorithm (SAA), we proposed a Hybrid Genetic Simulated Annealing Algorithm (HGSAA) to search for the optimal solution of the model
Summary
With the development of the economy, people pay more attention to their health. As a result, families keep more spare drugs in case of emergency, resulting in a dramatic increase in the number of expired drugs. In this paper, the government is the core of expired drug recycling with the responsibility of designing the network, and uses a subsidy policy instead of just legislations or regulations as an incentive mechanism for the residents and drugstores. It proposes a tri-level programming model to optimize the recycling logistics network and government subsidy policy, whereby people have the expired drugs, some drugstores are selected to take the responsibility of recycling expired drugs, and parts of the garbage disposal station network are selected to take responsibility for disposing of expired drugs, as a result, all of the expired drugs are recycled and disposed of, while the total costs are minimized.
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