Reuse of tertiary packaging in production distribution network

Abstract

Tertiary packaging is necessary for transportation in production distribution network because of the benefits in enhancing the logistic efficiency. However, in the meantime, it produces a lot of packaging waste every day. In fact, some tertiary packaging after transportation may still be in good condition and can be collected back for reuse. However, this has not been widely studied in the existing literature. Accordingly, this paper proposed an optimization methodology to maximize the collection of used tertiary packaging for reuse, meanwhile minimizing the total operating cost by taking the advantages of simultaneous optimization of a multi-day planning.