Transportation Risk Control of Waste Disposal in the Healthcare System with Two-Echelon Waste Collection Network

This paper investigates a vehicle routing problem arising in the waste collection of the healthcare system with the concern of transportation risk. Three types of facilities abstracted from the health system are investigated in this paper, namely, facilities with collection points, facilities without collection points, and small facilities. Two-echelon collection mode is applied in which the waste generated by small facilities is first collected by collection points, and then transferred to the recycling centre. To solve this problem, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming model considering time windows and vehicle capacity, and we use particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm for solving large-scale problems. Numerical experiments show the capability of the proposed algorithm. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to investigate the influence of facilities with collection points and the collection routes. This research can provide a decision support tool for the routing of waste collection in the healthcare system.