Design of urban medical waste recycling network considering loading reliability under uncertain conditions

•Consideration of the joint optimization of the location and vehicle routing.•The concept of ‘loading reliability’ is proposed.•Addressing theNP-hard problem with the proposed modified heuristic algorithm.•The proposed algorithm outperforms the CPLEX solver in terms of speed and efficiency. The ongoing global coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has significantly increased urban medical waste. Such waste often contains pathogenic microorganisms, harmful chemicals, and even radioactive and defective substances, hence imposing disease transmission and public health risks. Nevertheless, due to multiple factors, the amount of medical waste produced in medical institutions is stochastic. This paper proposed an optimization model for a waste recycling network consideration of loading reliability to minimize the collective cost of location, vehicle usage, and transportation. A modified ant colony algorithm combined with the K-means clustering method based on a genetic algorithm is then proposed (MACO-GKA) to solve the optimal location problem and the vehicle routing problem (LP-VRP). The numerical examples are then conducted in Xuzhou City, China to evaluate the performance of the proposed model. Taking the loading reliability level θ=0.9 as an example, the results show that the total cost will reach $100546.53 when collection points are not set, but decrease to $86,907.11 when they are set. In the latter case, the total cost was reduced by 13.57%. The detailed results indicate that the selection and establishment of medical waste collection points are essential factors in designing an urban medical waste recycling network. The proposed MACO-GKA algorithm also outperforms the CPLEX solver.