An artificial bee colony algorithm for medical goods distribution and pharmacological waste collection by hybrid vehicles considering environmental criteria
Journal of Modelling in Management
ISSN: 1746-5664
Article publication date: 6 November 2023
Issue publication date: 13 March 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to focus on a medical goods distribution problem and pharmacological waste collection by plug-in hybrid vehicles with some real-world restrictions. In this research, considering alternative energy sources and simultaneous pickup and delivery led to a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions and distribution costs, respectively.
Design/methodology/approach
Here, this problem has been modeled as mixed-integer linear programming with the traveling and energy consumption costs objective function. The GAMS was used for model-solving in small-size instances. Because the problem in this research is an NP-hard problem and solving real-size problems in a reasonable time is impossible, in this study, the artificial bee colony algorithm is used.
Findings
Then, the algorithm results are compared with a simulated annealing algorithm that recently was proposed in the literature. Finally, the results obtained from the exact solution and metaheuristic algorithms are compared, analyzed and reported. The results showed that the artificial bee colony algorithm has a good performance.
Originality/value
In this paper, medical goods distribution with pharmacological waste collection is studied. The paper was focused on plug-in hybrid vehicles with simultaneous pickup and delivery. The problem was modeled with environmental criteria. The traveling and energy consumption costs are considered as an objective function.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Availability of data and materials: The data sets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.
Funding: Not applicable.
Citation
Behnamian, J. and Kiani, Z. (2024), "An artificial bee colony algorithm for medical goods distribution and pharmacological waste collection by hybrid vehicles considering environmental criteria", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 1003-1023. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-04-2022-0100
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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