Approaches to eliminate waste and reduce cost for recycling glass

In recent years, the issue of environmental protection has received considerable attention. This paper adds to the literature by investigating a scheduling problem in the manufacturing of a glass recycling factory in Taiwan. The objective is to minimize the sum of the total holding cost and loss cost. We first represent the problem as an integer programming (IP) model, and then develop two heuristics based on the IP model to find near-optimal solutions for the problem. To validate the proposed heuristics, comparisons between optimal solutions from the IP model and solutions from the current method are conducted. The comparisons involve two problem sizes, small and large, where the small problems range from 15 to 45 jobs, and the large problems from 50 to 100 jobs. Finally, a genetic algorithm is applied to evaluate the proposed heuristics. Computational experiments show that the proposed heuristics can find good solutions in a reasonable time for the considered problem.

► This study investigates a scheduling problem in a glass recycling factory. ► An integer programming model is developed to obtain the optimal solution. ► Two heuristics are presented to find near-optimal solutions to hard problems. ► The proposed heuristic improves the current method by 20.77%.