A MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR MULTI-PRODUCT RECYCLING NETWORK DESIGN

Recycling may be defined as the process of transforming the end-of-life products into raw materials used in manufacturing, and it is the most applied recovery method in the field of reverse logistics. an efficient recycling network is possible only with an efficient reverse logistics network design where products are collected from customers, disassembled and recycled at an appropriate recycling facility. in this context, another issue to consider is how the products to be disassembled. disassembling a product in detail is costly considering the workforce used but it is profitable due to the outcome. in this study, a multi-product recycling network is considered for multiple recoverable material types. any product examined may be disassembled due to multiple disassembly schemes where the outcome of every scheme differs in quantity. the problem considered is defined in detail and a mixed integer mathematical model is proposed in order to solve the problem. a total of 240 test problems, small and large dimensioned, are generated and solved with a one-hour cpu time limit, in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the model. for the 103 out of 240 test problems the optimal solution is found and for the rest of the problems the difference between the best solution found in one hour and the lower bound found for the problem is determined. the results are analyzed for system parameters considering the cpu times.