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

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 infectiousmedicalwaste. Thesewaste 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. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.