Abstract
This paper investigates a vehicle routing problem arising in the waste collection of the healthcare system with the concern of transportation risk. Three types of facilities abstracted from the health system are investigated in this paper, namely, facilities with collection points, facilities without collection points, and small facilities. Two-echelon collection mode is applied in which the waste generated by small facilities is first collected by collection points, and then transferred to the recycling centre. To solve this problem, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming model considering time windows and vehicle capacity, and we use particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm for solving large-scale problems. Numerical experiments show the capability of the proposed algorithm. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to investigate the influence of facilities with collection points and the collection routes. This research can provide a decision support tool for the routing of waste collection in the healthcare system.
Highlights
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, healthcare systems are under enormous pressure. e healthcare system needs to treat more patients and prevent the spread of diseases, as well as dispose of the waste generated by the infected victims. e waste is more hazardous to the public than other common solid waste as it is infectious and toxic [1]
Building a waste collection network covering all facilities could be challenging. To deal with these complexities, a two-echelon collection mode is applied by some collection network, where the waste in some facilities is directly collected, and collection points are constructed to collect and transfer the waste produced by small facilities
Decision variables used in the study are as follows: αi,j: binary variable, set to 1 if the waste of small facility i is transferred to the collection point j, 0 otherwise, i ∈ I3, j ∈ I1 βi,r: binary variable, set to 1 if the facility i is served by route r, 0 otherwise, i ∈ I1 ∪ I2, r ∈ R ci,j,r: binary variable, set to 1 if the vehicle r serves the facility j immediately after serving the facility i, 0 otherwise, i ∈ I1 ∪ I2 ∪ {e}, j ∈ I1 ∪ I2 ∪ e′, r ∈ R δi,r: float variable, the arrival time of facility i in route r, i ∈ I1 ∪ I2, r ∈ R
Summary
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, healthcare systems are under enormous pressure. e healthcare system needs to treat more patients and prevent the spread of diseases, as well as dispose of the waste generated by the infected victims. e waste is more hazardous to the public than other common solid waste as it is infectious and toxic [1]. In a typical waste collection network, several routes are assigned to collect the waste generated by the daily operation of the healthcare system, which covers all facilities of the system. Jammeli et al [20] propose a model to determine the vehicle routes and the number of waste bins to be assigned to each potential location and conduct a biobjective optimisation of minimising the collection costs and the environmental impact. 3. Problem Background is research aims to minimise the transportation risk of waste collection network in the healthcare system. E above problem setting can be abstracted as a capacitated VRP with time windows, in which the recycling centre serves as the depot of the network, the facilities with collection points and facilities. E decision problem contains the vehicle collection routes as well as the time of the tasks served
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