Material Recovery Facility Location and Waste Flow Assignment Problem Based on Scatter Search

Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) location and waste flow assignment decision problem were investigated. In a three stages network consisted of production factory, landfills and transfer stations, material recovery facilities, the decision problem is to choose a best set of material recovery facilities with capacity constraints and decide the optimal flow on the network to minimize the total operational cost. The problem is firstly formulated a mathematic model. Then, a scatter search algorithm with update strategy of reference set according to the level of the diversity and quality of solutions is developed to solve effectively the model. The computational experiments show that the scatter search algorithm can obtain the valid solution of the location problem and is better than the general scatter search without the special update strategy on solution quality.