Improved approaches to the network design problem in regional hazardous waste management systems

•Investigate a complicated regional hazardous waste network design problem.•Incorporate many real-life constraints in the management of hazardous wastes.•Develop a general multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model.•Customize three general-purpose multi-objective optimization approaches.

This paper investigates the network design problem arising from the regional hazardous waste management system. The problem is to identify the locations of various waste facilities, and determine the transportation routes of hazardous wastes and waste residues between those waste facilities. Aiming at minimizing jointly the total cost and total risk, the problem is formulated as a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model. By exploiting the advantages of the model, three multi-objective optimization approaches are customized to find highly qualified non-dominated solutions. The effectiveness and efficiency of the approaches are examined both on a hypothetical case and a realistic case.