Medical waste management during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak: A mathematical programming model

Kannan Govindan; Arash Khalili Nasr; Parisa Mostafazadeh; Hassan Mina

doi:10.1016/j.cie.2021.107668

Medical waste management during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak: A mathematical programming model

Comput Ind Eng. 2021 Dec:162:107668. doi: 10.1016/j.cie.2021.107668. Epub 2021 Sep 16.

Authors

Kannan Govindan^{1

2

3}, Arash Khalili Nasr⁴, Parisa Mostafazadeh⁵, Hassan Mina⁵

Affiliations

¹ China Institute of FTZ Supply Chain, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai 201306, China.
² Yonsei Frontier Lab, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.
³ Center for Sustainable Supply Chain Engineering, Department of Technology and Innovation, Danish Institute for Advanced Study, University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, Odense M, Denmark.
⁴ Graduate School of Management and Economics, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
⁵ School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

Municipal solid waste (MSW) directly impacts community health and environmental degradation; therefore, the management of MSW is crucial. Medical waste is a specific type of MSW which is generally divided into two categories: infectious and non-infectious. Wastes generated by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are classified among infectious medical wastes; moreover, these wastes are hazardous because they threaten the environment and living organisms if they are not appropriately managed. This paper develops a bi-objective mixed-integer linear programming model for medical waste management during the COVID-19 outbreak. The proposed model minimizes the total costs and risks, simultaneously, of the population's exposure to pollution. This paper considers some realistic assumptions for the first time, including location-routing problem, time window-based green vehicle routing problem, vehicles scheduling, vehicles failure, split delivery, population risk, and load-dependent fuel consumption to manage both infectious and non-infectious medical waste. We apply a fuzzy goal programming approach for solving the proposed bi-objective model, and the efficiency of the proposed model and solution approach is assessed using data related to 13 nodes of medical waste production in a location west of Tehran.

Keywords: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); Fuzzy goal programming approach; Mathematical programming model; Medical waste management; Municipal solid waste.