The construction industry is developing rapidly along with the acceleration of urbanization but accompanied by an increased amount of construction and demolition waste (CDW). From the perspective of sustainability, the existing research has mainly focused on CDW treatment or landfill disposal, but the challenge of reverse logistics of CDW recycling that provides overall CDW route planning for multiple participants and coordinates the transportation process between multiple participants is still unclear. This paper develops an optimization model for multi-depot vehicle routing problems with time windows (MDVRPTW) for CDW transportation that is capable of coordinating involved CDW participants and suggesting a cost-effective, environment-friendly, and resource-saving transportation plan. Firstly, economic cost, environmental pollution, and social impact are discussed to establish this optimization-oriented decision model for MDVRPTW. Then, a method combined with a large neighborhood search algorithm and a local search algorithm is developed to plan the transportation route for CDW reverse logistics process. With the numerical experiments, the computational results illustrate the better performance of this proposed method than those traditional methods such as adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm or adaptive genetic algorithm. Finally, a sensitivity analysis considering time window, vehicle capacity, and carbon tax rate is conducted respectively, which provides management implications to support the decision-making of resource utilization maximization for enterprises and carbon emission management for the government.
Keywords: construction and demolition waste; recycling; reverse logistics; route; sustainable.