Abstract
This article investigates the transportation task of Health-care waste (HCW). The particularity of HCW, compared to ordinary waste, is that it may contain infectious and/or toxic substances. The disposal of this waste involves transporting it from healthcare facilities (HCF) to treatment centers. This step can be threatening to humans and the environment if not managed with the utmost care. To ensure the safe management of HCW, the separation policy between dangerous and normal waste should be honored. Hence, a vehicle routing problem with multi-compartment vehicles is adopted with the underlying objective of minimizing the total travel distance. Given the NP-hardness of the problem, an adaptive evolutionary algorithm is proposed based on the results of pre–post statistical tests of the population. The proposed algorithm is compared to the best so far solutions on medium and large instances using benchmarks from the literature. The experimental study confirms the efficiency of the proposed approach against the competing algorithms. Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate the managerial insights of the studied problem.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
