An efficient two-phase iterative heuristic for Collection-Disassembly problem

Closing the loop in the supply chains is one of the mandatory conditions for more sustainable development. The Collection-Disassembly Problem appears in the reverse part of the closed-loop supply chains. Its aim is to coordinate the activities of collection of end-of-life products from collection centres and their subsequent disassembly. The disassembly step is required for efficient remanufacturing and recycling of returned products. The Collection-Disassembly problem integrates such optimization problems as dynamic lot-sizing and vehicle routing in general cases. In this paper, we develop a Two-Phase Iterative Heuristic to efficiently address large size instances. The numerical tests show that the heuristic provides good solutions under acceptable computational time

On green routing and scheduling problem

The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization tools

A Two-Stage Approach for Routing Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Stochastic Fuel Consumption

The past decade has seen a substantial increase in the use of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both civil and military applications. This article addresses an important aspect of refueling in the context of routing multiple small UAVs to complete a surveillance or data collection mission. Specifically, this article formulates a multiple-UAV routing problem with the refueling constraint of minimizing the overall fuel consumption for all of the vehicles as a two-stage stochastic optimization problem with uncertainty associated with the fuel consumption of each vehicle. The two-stage model allows for the application of sample average approximation (SAA). Although the SAA solution asymptotically converges to the optimal solution for the two-stage model, the SAA run time can be prohibitive for medium- and large-scale test instances. Hence, we develop a tabu-search-based heuristic that exploits the model structure while considering the uncertainty in fuel consumption. Extensive computational experiments corroborate the benefits of the two-stage model compared to a deterministic model and the effectiveness of the heuristic for obtaining high-quality solutions.Comment: 18 page