GRASP Solution Approach for the E-Waste Collection Problem

The digital economy has brought significant advancements in electronic devices, increasing convenience and comfort in people's lives. However, this progress has also led to a shorter life cycle for these devices due to rapid advancements in hardware and software technology. As a result, e-waste collection and recycling have become vital for protecting the environment and people's health. From the operations research perspective, the e-waste collection problem can be modeled as the Heterogeneous Vehicle Routing Problem with Multiple Time Windows (HVRP-MTW). This study proposes a metaheuristic based on the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure complemented by Path Relinking (GRASP-PR) to solve the HVRP-MTW problem. The experiment demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can efficiently handle HVRP-MTW instances, even of large-scale. Moreover, the comparison with CPLEX indicates that our approach can achieve optimal solutions for small instances and outperform the commercial solver in large-scale instances.