The location-routing problem in the municipal solid waste logistics system

How to save the cost of collection and transportation is one of the biggest problems in the solid waste management. In this paper, the periodic vehicle routing problem with intermediate facilities, i.e. waste transfer stations, was analyzed. There are two kinds of vehicles, collection vehicles and transportation vehicles, and some transfer stations in the system. The collection vehicles can renew their capacity at the transfer stations, where the transportation vehicles can get the waste container. The objective of this paper is to combine the location of the transfer station and the vehicles routing into a mathematical model, which is called PLRP-IF model, to minimize the system operation cost. And a two-phase Tabu search algorithm was developed to solve this model. Finally the computational result of the instances taken from the literature was presented.