Sustainable development-oriented location-transportation integrated optimization problem regarding multi-period multi-type disaster medical waste during COVID-19 pandemic

After the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, devising an effective reverse logistics supply chain to clean up disaster medical waste is conducive to controlling and containing novel coronavirus transmission. Thus, the focus of this paper concentrates on multi-period multi-type disaster medical waste location-transportation integrated optimization problem with the concern of sustainability, which is formulated as a tri-objective mixed-integer programming model with the goals of maximizing total economic benefits, minimizing total carbon emissions and total potential social risks. Then, a real-world case from Wuhan using CPLEX solver is used to validate the developed model. Results indicate that constructing DMWTTSs with flexible capacity in different periods is encouraged to handle the sharply increasing disaster medical waste. The multi-period decision model outperforms the single-period one in disaster medical waste supply chains because the former has the capability of handling the uncertainties in the future periods. Increasingly, since the increase of budget doesn’t always work well and social resources are limited, the estimation of minimum budget to obtain optimum overall performance is of great importance.