Design and optimisation of a green manufacturing-recycling network considering heavy metal pollutants – an electronic assembly case

This paper presents a green manufacturing-recycling network design approach for multi-echelon electronic assembly process under a complex product mix scenario which incorporates trade-off between economic cost and heavy metal pollutants. The approach is developed by formulating the green manufacturing-recycling network into a closed-loop logistics bi-objective optimisation model, in order to alleviate negative environmental influence by applying proper cleaner production technologies. The environmental influence is quantified by pollution equivalent numbers which are integrated in the model. Moreover, the volume of the heavy metal pollutants is optimised by selecting the cleaner production level and thus is jointly coordinated with the operation cost. To solve the bi-objective optimisation model, an enhanced global criterion approach is presented to improve the effectiveness on dealing with non-convexity of the Pareto-optimal frontier with computational efficient solutions. The proposed model is implemented on a case study to verify its flexibility to handle the closed-loop manufacturing-recycling network design of different sizes, as well as to obtain trade-off between operation cost and environmental influence by the heavy metal pollutants under various scenarios.