Designing routes for WEEE collection: the vehicle routing problem with split loads and date windows

Abstract

This paper presents an integer programming model and describes a GRASP based algorithm to solve a vehicle routing and scheduling problem for the collection of Waste of Electric and Electronic Equipment (WEEE). The difficulty of this problem arises from the fact that it is characterized by four variants of the vehicle routing problem that have been studied independently in the literature, but not together. The experimental analysis on a large set of randomly-generated instances shows the good performance of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, computational results using real data show that the method outperforms real existing approaches to reverse logistics.