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This paper studies a multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows specifically related to urban waste collection. Urban waste collection is one of the municipal activities with large costs and has many practical difficulties. In other words, waste collection and disposal is a costly task due to high operating expenses (fuel, maintenance, recycling, manpower, etc.) and small improvements in this field can result in tremendous savings on municipal expenditure. In the raised problem, the goal is to minimize total cost including traversing cost, vehicle employment cost, and exit penalty from permissible time windows. In this problem, the waste is deposited at the points indicating the demand nodes, in which each demand shows the volume of generated waste. Considering multiple trips for vehicles and time windows are the most critical features of the problem, so that the priorities of serving some specific places such as hospitals can be observed. Since vehicle routing problems (VRP) belongs to NP-hard problems, an efficient simulated annealing (SA) is proposed to solve the problem. The computational results show that our proposed algorithm has a great performance in a short computational time in comparison with the CPLEX solver. Finally, in order to demonstrate the applicability of the model, a case study is analyzed in Iran, and the optimal policies are presented.

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Greenhouse gases (GHG) are the main reason for the global warming during the past decades. On the other hand, establishing a well-structured transportation system will yield to create least cost-pollution. This paper addresses a novel model for the multi-trip Green Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (G-CARP) with the aim of minimizing total cost including the cost of generation and emission of greenhouse gases, the cost of vehicle usage and routing cost. The cost of generation and emission of greenhouse gases is based on the calculation of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from vehicles, which depends on such factors as the vehicle speed, weather conditions, load on the vehicle and traveled distance. The main applications of this problem are in municipalities for urban waste collection, road surface marking and so forth. Due to NP-hardness of the problem, a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) is developed, wherein a heuristic and simulated annealing algorithm are applied to generate initial solutions and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is then used to generate the best possible solution. The obtained numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm could present desirable performance within a suitable computational run time. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is implemented on the maximum available time of the vehicles in order to determine the optimal policy.

Along with the increased competition in production and service areas, many organizations attempt to provide their products at a lower price and higher quality. On the other hand, consideration of environmental criteria in the conventional supplier selection methodologies is required for companies trying to promote green supply chain management (GSCM). In this regard, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used to evaluate and rate the suppliers. Then, considering the resource constraint, weight of criteria and a rank of suppliers are taken into account in a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MOMILP) to determine the optimum order quantity of each supplier under uncertain conditions. To deal with the uncertain multi-objectiveness of the proposed model, a robust goal programming (RGP) approach based on Shannon entropy is applied. The offered methodology is applied to a real case study from a green service food manufacturing company in Iran in order to verify its applicability with a sensitivity analysis performed on different uncertainty levels. Furthermore, the threshold of robustness worthiness (TRW) is studied by applying different budgets of uncertainty for the green service food manufacturing company. Finally, a discussion and conclusion on the applicability of the methodology is provided, and an outlook to future research projects is given.