Abstract:

The recycle and reuse of recyclable wastes is an important way of a good social and economic cycle, and plays a decisive role in resource conservation and environmental protection. The idea of reverse logistics based on the principle of 'sustainable development and circular economy' has increasingly gained attention as the issue of resource wastage and environmental degradation has become more serious. In order to explore the impact of recyclable wastes transportation on cost, environment and resources, this paper focuses on a vehicle routing problem considering electric heterogeneous fleet for a two-echelon recycling network, recycling stations and recycling centers. With the goal of minimizing the total cost, a recycling heterogeneous fleet electric vehicle routing model with time windows is established under the consideration of vehicle load constraints, vehicle type constraints on the weight of loaded recyclable wastes and customer's allowable service time constraints. For carbon emissions reduction and environment protection, vehicles used in recycling stations are designated as electric vehicles. Then, a hybrid genetic algorithm with a large-scale neighborhood search algorithm is proposed. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted on vehicle types in recycling stations, and the computational results show the use of heterogeneous fleets could reduce costs. This heterogeneous fleet recyclables collection routing model can greatly support the construction of recycling centers and the planning of recycling tasks, and provide a basis for recycling companies to deal with the relationship between economy, environment and resources.