Integrated E-waste transportation using capacitated general routing problem with time-window

Abstract

Formal collectors of electronics waste in the developing countries are struggling to survive despite receiving governmental subsidies at the early stages of their activities. The formal collection enterprises fail to collect much of the electrical and electronic equipment wastes (WEEE) due to the operational limitations and the households' preference for the traditional door-to-door collection services; this situation has resulted in inappropriate management of the WEEE stream. This study puts forward an integrated collection scheme that simultaneously considers the on-call and door-to-door demands. To explore how to effectively implement the proposed approach, an original capacitated general routing model with time-window (CGRPTW) is studied, which facilitates the general routing methodology for WEEE collection practices. A set of test instances – testbed – based on real data is developed to investigate the proposed collection scheme under various operational situations. On this basis, it is shown that the resulting improvement is more significant under certain operational, i.e. capacity- and time-management decisions. Overall, this study explores trade-offs between profit- and service-oriented paradigms for the management of the collectors' behavior within the integrated WEEE collection scheme.