Nonlinear optimization to management problems of end-of-life vehicles with environmental protection awareness and damaged/aging degrees

Abstract

In the past one decade, an increasing number of motor vehicles necessarily results in huge amounts of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) in the future. From the view point of environment protection and resource utilization, government subsidy and public awareness of environmental protection play a critical role in promoting the formal recycle enterprises to recycle the ELVs as many as possible. Different from the existing similar models, a mixed integer nonlinear optimization model is established in this paper to formulate the management problems of recycling ELVs as a centralized decision-making system, where damaged and aging degrees, correlation between the recycled quantity and take-back price of ELVs, and the public environmental protection awareness are considered. Unlike the results available in the literature, take-back prices of the ELVs are the endogenous variables of the model (decision variables), which affect the collected quantity of ELVs and the profit of recycling system. Additionally, due to distinct damaged and aging degrees of the ELVs, the refurbished or dismantled amounts of ELVs are also regarded as the decision variables so that the recycle system is more applicable. By case study and sensitivity analysis, validity of the model is verified and impacts of the governmental subsidy and environmental awareness are analyzed. By the proposed model, it is revealed that: (1) Distinct treatment of ELVs with different damaged and aging degrees can increase the profit of recycling ELVs; (2) Compared with the transportation cost, higher processing cost is a main obstacle to the profit growth. Advanced processing technology plays the most important role in improving the ELV recovery efficiency. (3) Both of government subsidy and environmental awareness seriously affect decision-making of recycle enterprises.