Decentralized bi-level decision planning model for municipal solid waste recycling and management with cost reliability under uncertain environment

This study presents bi-level decision making model for the management of municipal solid wastes (MSW). The model starts with waste disposals by the people, followed by its collection and distribution to the respective waste treatment facilities (WTF) and disposal centre. The loop continued to the transportation of untreated waste from treatment facilities to disposal centres and finally the transportation of products from treatment facilities to different markets. Minimizing the net transportation cost and maximizing the revenues generated from treatment facilities are considered as objective functions of first and second level respectively. Assuming the uncertainty in transportation, concept of cost reliability in the transportation cost is incorporated. Decisions are made successively from the first level to the second level. Decision variables are partitioned between the two levels and are called as controlling factors. Linear membership functions for fuzzily described objective functions and controlling factors are constructed to obtain the final solutions. Fuzzy Goal Programming is then applied to obtain the final solutions. Finally, we provide a numerical illustration to illustrate and justify the proposed model. The model could be extended by including the transportation mechanism of the used and rejected products from the customers forming a closed loop network of solid waste management. (C) 2018 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.