Robust facility location in reverse logistics.

Area of Science:

• Operations Research
• Environmental Management
• Supply Chain Management

Background:

• Growing environmental awareness necessitates alternatives to traditional supply chains.
• Reverse logistics is crucial for resource recovery and efficient material flow.
• Designing effective reverse logistics networks is a key challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address design questions in waste wood supply networks.
• To develop mathematical models for collection and transportation to processing facilities.
• To incorporate economies of scale and robustness into facility location decisions.

Main Methods:

• Facility location problem formulation for waste wood.
• Development of mathematical models considering economies of scale and robustness.
• Application of bilevel optimization for exact solutions on small instances.
• Implementation of local search and tabu search for large-scale problems.

Main Results:

• Validated models and methods on both real-life and artificial datasets.
• Demonstrated performance of proposed optimization and metaheuristic approaches.
• Provided insights into robust network design for waste wood.

Conclusions:

• The developed mathematical models and computational methods are effective for designing robust reverse logistics networks for waste wood.
• Bilevel optimization and metaheuristics offer viable solutions for facility location problems in this domain.
• This research contributes to sustainable resource management through optimized waste wood supply chains.