A Bi‐Objective Inventory Routing Problem for Sustainable Waste Management Under Uncertainty

Abstract

The fast increase in waste materials disposed of by home-health and medical care services as well as by self-attending patients leads to a major concern over the safe disposal of health care waste. In this paper, we consider the design of a collection system for infectious medical waste. These waste materials are produced by patients in self-treatment, stored at pharmacies and picked up by local authorities for disposal.The stochastic waste collection problem is formulated considering two conflicting objective functions. Social objectives, specifically the satisfaction of pharmacists and local authorities involved in the collection process, as well as the minimization of public health risks need to be traded off against distribution costs comprising routing costs and fixed costs incurred each time a tour is planned. We propose three heuristic solution approaches to solve the real-world motivated inventory routing problem. The suggested methods are tested on real-world data from the region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, in France, and their performance is evaluated with several quality indicators.

A multi-objective healthcare inventory routing problem; a fuzzy possibilistic approach

“…Agra et al (2014) studied a ''short sea fuel oil distribution problem'' to determine distribution policies while the routing and operating costs are minimized. Nolz et al (2014) presented a multi-objective mathematical model and integrated social issues (the collection of pharmaceutical waste) with classical IRP. To the best of our knowledge, there are a few studies which tried to integrate healthcare and IRP.…”

A Mathematical Model for Scheduling and Assignment of Customers in Hospital Waste Collection Routes

“…Algorithms considering multiple objectives for the waste collection problem have been proposed by several authors. In Nolz et al [10], the authors consider the design of a collection system for infectious medical waste. A multi-objective stochastic waste collection problem is formulated considering two conflicting objective functions.…”

A unified framework for rich routing problems with stochastic demands

“…Nolz et al (2014b) propose a scenario sampling method and an ALNS algorithm for the same problem. Nolz et al (2014a) extend this to a bi-objective problem, trading off satisfaction of pharmacies, local authorities and the minimization of public health risks against routing costs. They propose three meta-heuristic approaches for this problem.…”