Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

Application of Genetic Algorithms for the Design of Large-Scale Reverse

Logistic Networks in Europes Automotive Industry
Ralf Schleiffer, Jens Wollenweber, Hans-Juergen Sebastian
University of Technology Aachen, Templergraben 64, 52072 Aachen, Germany
E-mail: {schleiffer, wollenweber, sebastian}@or.rwth-aachen.de

Florian Golm, Natasha Kapoustina

Ford Research Center Aachen, Suesterfeldstrasse 200, 52072 Aachen, Germany
E-mail: {nkapoust, fgolm}@ford.com

Abstract
After providing a brief overview on Europes
legislative situation with regard to the demanded
recovering and recycling of end-of-life vehicles the
paper characterizes the specifications of a modeling
approach describing the design of a recycling
network including a large variety of different
cooperating actors set at diverse positions on a
reverse supply-chain. It advances with a discussion
of requirements a suitable optimization approach
needs to fulfill. Then it proceeds by addressing the
optimization approach that has been chosen and it
concludes by providing results for an ideal network
design.

Introduction

At present there are between seven million and

nine million end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) of classes
M1 and N11, which annually have to be cleared
within the European Community.2 According to the
German consortium Arbeitsgemeinschaft Altauto it is
estimated that between 1.1 million and 1.9 million of
these vehicles will emerge in Germany only [1]. In
order to handle the associated environmental
problems the European regulation for ELVs became
effective in April 1998, and with it the voluntary
pledge regarding the environmentally sound
management of ELVs within the framework of the
1

The class M1 contains vehicles for passenger transport with a

maximum of eight seats, not including the drivers seat. The
class N1 accumulates vehicles for good transport with a
maximum permissible weight of up to 3.5 tons.
All terms are used according to the English translation of their
definition in the German law concerning the recovery of end-oflife vehicles, version three, 7 August, 2001 (Gesetz ber die
Entsorgung von Altfahrzeugen, Lesefassung Artikel 3, Stand 7.
August 2001).

closed substance cycle and waste management act

signed by all parties involved in Germanys
automotive industry, including those companies that
collect, recycle, recover and dispose ELVs. The goal
of both, the European regulation and the voluntary
pledge, is the environmentally sound utilization and
disposal of ELVs of classes M1 and N1.
The current version of Germanys Gesetz ueber
die Entsorgung von Altfahrzeugen (AltfahrzeugG)
from 21 June 2002 obligates all manufacturers of
vehicles belonging to any of the two classes, to take
back vehicles of their brand at approved acceptance
or collection facilities free of charge for the vehicles
current owner. In particular, it is demanded that such
a facility exists in a reasonable distance3 for each
owner. Apart from the establishment of such an areawide network of facilities to retract ELVs the ELV
ordinance defines ratios to be complied with during
the subsequent treatment of ELVs and stripped
vehicles. Thus, it is demanded that by 1 January 2006
at least eighty-five percent of a vehicles weight have
to be recovered, reused and utilized, and that at least
eighty percent of a vehicles weight has to be
recovered and recycled.4 A further aggravation of
these ratios is intended for 2015.
Specialists estimate that from twenty-five up to
thirty percent of the total costs of the recycling
network to be installed occur in the domain of
logistics. Apart from pure transport costs, which must
be beard by the manufacturer at last, this fact implies
an increasing burden for the transportation network,
which is hardly accessible at present, as well as a
clear raising of transport-caused emissions. In the
terms of both, economical and ecological aspects, the
exhaustion of the potentials for possible reductions of

3
4

A reasonable distance is a distance that is below 50 km.

Weight percentages always refer to the accumulated weight of all
ELVs per year.

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

the necessary transportation for the common welfare

compatible recycling of ELVs is thus urgently
required. Above all the methods and approaches of
reverse supply-chain-management combined with
operations research modeling techniques provide the
necessary capabilities to find solutions for this
problem, which due to a suitable network design
contribute to the reduction of transportation,
measured in terms of cost, mileage and
environmental pollution, and which actively support
the inter-modal transfer of goods. In order to achieve
the goals of a high-standing and environmentally
compatible treatment of ELVs, an integrated network
design, that apart from facilities to take back, to
dismantle and to utilize ELVs also covers shredding
enterprises and facilities for the subsequent treatment
of valuable material, is inevitable.
In the following we will report on the
development of a decision-support tool. The tool
enables the generation of networks that consist of
locations where owners can return their vehicles
(acceptance and collecting), dismantling facilities,
shredding companies, post-shredding facilities,
enterprises for the reuse, recycling, recovery and
disposal of material of ELVs, and that helps reducing
the number of required transports to a minimum.

Facility Location Problem

The task that can be derived from the brief

explanation above is to solve some sort of a facility
location problem. The simplest form of this problem
is that given a set of facility locations and a set of
customers who are served from these facilities it has
to be decided, which facilities should be used, and
which customers should be served from which
facility, so as to minimize the total cost of all
customers, measured as a weighted sum of all
distances between a customer and the facility that
serves him (figure 1).

2.1

Customers and availability of ELVs

The circles in figure 1 represent the location of

customers, who are in our case the last owners of
ELVs. It is not necessary that this is a one-to-one
relationship, i.e. that each circle represents exactly
one last owner. The area shown can as well be
considered as being divided into n N distinct and
non-overlapping two-dimensional zones Z i , 1 i n ,
which unification is the whole area under
consideration and where n equals the number of
occurrences of the circles. In our approach these
zones relate directly to a considered European
countrys zip-code areas. The ELVs within the
borders of zone Z i add up to the total supply of
ELVs si N in Z i . Historic data about cleared cars
is taken to forecast this number of ELVs per zone.
The forecasted numbers can be modified within the
tool to validate optimization results with different
scenarios.
We assume that si is concentrated at a single
point (xi , y i ) Z i , which is the geographical centroid
of Z i , determined by the surrounding traverse. This
assumption limits the granularity of our approach to
the granularity of zip-code areas.
Supposing that a facility F j , 1 j m N with
unconstrained capacity is located at the point

(~x , ~y )  Z
n

i =1

and having dist (Z i , Fj ) R denote the

distance between zone Z i and facility F j , we model

transport cost ci per distance unit as a nonmonotonic
and
non-continuous
function
ci (dist (Z i , F j )) R that is equal to zero for all
transports within a user-defined reasonable
distance, rd R , and that for distances higher than
this point of discontinuity gradually decreases. Then
the total transport cost of taking back zone Z i ELVs
by facility F j is si ci dist (Z i , F j ) and the problem to
be solved is to minimize the sum of all these cost
over all zones Z i and over all facilities F j , i.e.
n

min si ci dist Z i , F j sij where sij [0, 1] R is a

i =1 j =1

real-valued decision-variable indicating the portion

of zone Z i ELVs served by facility F j . Note that
modeling sij as a real-valued variable instead of

Figure 1. Facility location problem (example)

choosing a binary form enables allowing each zone

Z i to be served by multiple facilities. Hence we
assume that the portion of customers of zone Z i
forwarding their ELV to facility F j decreases with
increasing distance as long as

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dist Z i , F j rd .

Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

Otherwise we assume that the accordant ELV is

collected by the vehicles manufacturer and shipped
to that facility F j for which dist (Z i , F j ) < dist (Z i , F j )

F j {F1 ,, Fm }/ F j . Therefore it is clear

for all

that as m and as rd increase the inbound cost for

the union of all facilities F j converges to zero. And
thus with rd fixed a lower bound for m so that

s c dist (Z , F ) s
n

ij

=0

can

easily

be

i =1 j =1

determined.
Up to here we considered only those facility
location problems in which a set of alternative
locations are provided and the task is to assign zones
to facilities and vice versa. With regard to the
problem to be solved here it is necessary to extend
the description above inasmuch as both, finding a
concrete position for each facility and determining
the number of facilities to be located, m , become
part of the problem. Thus our specific job consists of
three tasks, namely to determine the number of
facilities to be located, to identify positions for new
facility locations and to assign zones which are
served by these facilities. When m is large this
general problem is NP-hard. Then it becomes
relevant to use approximation algorithms or to
investigate important restricted situations where
polynomial time-algorithms can be applied.

2.2

Reverse supply chain

Making the problem more realistic requires

placing it within a broader context and to consider
also facilities S k , 1 k o N served by those
facilities F j which locations have to be determined.
Note that it is not necessary that each S k is served by
exactly one facility F j . S k being served by multiple
F j are an option, too.

Now, if m is low, e.g. because of facility

installment expenses, the number of ELVs, which
have to be picked up at the last owners place of
residence increases for the reason that for a growing
number of zones the reachability criterion cannot be
met. In these cases it might be cheaper to set up
further facilities for the retraction of ELVs, to group
collected ELVs for transshipment and then to
transport these groups to the closest facility F j , than
it is to pick up each ELV at the last owners home and
to ship it directly to the closest facility F j . In order
to model this we introduced an additional stage in the
reverse supply-chain, namely retraction facilities, Ol ,
1 l p N , which number and which locations have

to be determined. Noting O := {O1 ,, O p } we obtain

an

supply-chain

consisting

of

the

links

ZOF S .

At all the specific problem definition considered

here can be classified as a multi-level facility
location problem striving to minimize the overall cost
of the recycling system as well as its environmental
impact. Thus transport cost between an ELVs
location and the place where it is taken back and
inserted into a recycling process are only partially
assigned to the vehicle manufacturer.
ELVs that have been returned to an approved
retraction facility are shipped to a dismantler where
the intrinsic dismantling and recycling processes
commence.
The choice of transport means is of crucial
influence on the transport cost that arise per vehicle
until it arrives at a dismantlers place. Thus
transportation with trucks, railway and inland
waterway ship are regarded, whereby apart from the
criteria of transport costs and environmental impact
also flexibility, speed, availability, load factor and
transport-chain integration are considered.
In this transport phase the following assumptions
are made:
If either a retraction company or a dismantler is
reachable within a pre-defined distance from a last
owners place of residence the last owner is
responsible for returning his ELV and to pay for
the transport.
If neither a retraction company nor a dismantler is
located within a pre-defined distance from a last
owners place of residence the shipment of the
ELV from the last owners residence to either a
retraction company or a dismantler is paid by the
vehicle manufacturer.
Transports between retraction facilities and
dismantlers are typically performed by truck.
Optionally the ELVs are picked up at the retraction
company, transported to a transshipment place,
transferred to another transshipment place, picked
up by truck and delivered to a dismantler. The
transport between two transshipment points is
always performed by mass transportation, i.e. by
rail or inland waterway ship, with regard to the
availability of the corresponding transport mode.5
At a dismantler various parts of the ELV are
removed. The disassembly depth as well as the
capacity of a dismantler influence the disassembly
cost per vehicle. Of special importance is also a
possible spatial separation of the single disassembly
processes. For instance the evaluation and the
dewatering of an ELV and in consequence also the
5

Due to small distances within the concrete German recycling

network only transport by truck is considered.

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

disposal of fluids can take place at another place than

the actual disassembly. Here it is assumed that
evaluation, dewatering and disassembly of an ELV is
performed at a single location, though the model can
be extended to cover other options as well.
After the disassembly process is completed the
single components of the ELV are transported to
further facilities where these components are
recovered, recycled, re-used or disposed. These
facilities are considered as the customers of
dismantling enterprises. They include shredders,
distribution centers for used parts, disposal sites and
specific facilities for the recycling of fuel, used oil,
brake fluid, steel, aluminum, copper, other types of
metal, plastic, glass, rubber and batteries.
If information about additional facilities becomes
available our approach allows including these within
the optimization. Thus the specific facility location
problem considered here can be described as
determining the optimum number of retraction and
dismantling companies together with their locations
and their ideal capacities with regard to an optimal
selection of customers and post-dismantling
enterprises out of given sets of customers and
facilities, given a number of ELVs which are
reasonably distributed over the set of retraction and
dismantling companies due to the location of these.
The description above illustrates the need to
consider the input parameters of the multi-level
facility location problem. These input parameters
contain
the location of the single parties involved in the
recycling process, including current owners of
ELVs (the distribution of ELVs),
the characteristics of single ELVs, e.g. brand and
age,
the availability of alternative transport modes
between these parties (including multi-modal
transport options), as well as mode-specific travel
distances, travel times and cost,
the characteristics, capacity restrictions and cost of
single facilities
and the political, the regulative and the economical
situation in single European countries.

Problem Solving Approach

The objective of our search for solutions to the

problem considered here is not the identification of a
globally optimal network design. This follows
straight away from the circumstance that due to the
constantly expanding availability of information
those networks which are today identified as optimal
need not be considered optimal anymore when new
information, e.g. a new group of customers is
included tomorrow. Therefore the focus of the

approach here is to provide decision-makers with

further insights into the problem structure by
identifying characteristics of good solutions. In
particular the idea is to dynamically generate and
identify solutions with regard to the decision-makers
objectives and optimization criteria. Currently these
criteria are the minimization of overall costs cost N
and environmental impact environment R 8 whereby
a modification of these objectives is possible at any
time. Hence the objective function can be written as
$ denoting a
with
min (cost $ environment )
conjunction to be specified later.

3.1

Decision variables

Decision variables are the number of dismantling

facilities m m and the number of retraction
facilities p p , their locations, their capacities and
the topology of the network, i.e. the selection of
customers served by the dismantling facilities and the
transshipment points used throughout the single
paths.
Working on the basis of (five-digit) zip code
areas simplifies the problem in a notable way
because both the number of dismantling facilities that
can optionally be placed and the number of locations
for these facilities is bounded. The same is true with
regard to retraction facilities. Note that all other sets
considered here contain a finite number of elements,
too.

3.2

Optimization strategy

As experience has shown, during the process of

designing suitable and better performing recycling
networks it is best to present more and more
acceptable and reasonable designs to the decisionmakers in order to enable them to develop their
requirements to find network designs of high
performance to all considered obligations. Genetic
algorithms (GA), a family of stochastic optimization
techniques, are expected to do so. They give
multiple, acceptable and near optimum solution
candidates in large, possibly unstructured and nonsmooth search spaces. This means that decisionmakers are offered the possibility to examine these
candidates and that their judgment on these gives
them more information to develop their preference
statements with regard to various requirements.
3.2.1

Real-life evolution

The foundation of evolutionary theory comes up

with the synthesis of Darwinian theory and
Mendelian genetics. It is the idea that all species
share the same descent and that distinct species arise

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

through adaptive processes [7]. During many

generations those species that are best adapted to
their environment survive while other species die out
and others in turn emerge newly because of cross
breeding and mutation.
In natural systems any individual member of any
species can be described by its genetic package. The
genetic code is contained in a sequence of discrete
units called chromosomes. Each chromosome is a
linear structure of genes, which can be of different
types and which includes information. Pairing
disrupts the structure of these chromosomes as genes
are added, deleted or exchanged and thus pairing
might be a source of mutation that passes on from
generation to generation. So during the reproduction
process it is natural that the offsprings genetic code
becomes a mixture of the parents genetic make-up.
And it is also natural that during this process several
chromosomes mutate.
Such mutations of single genes usually have very
little effect but in some instances they rise to protein
whose function is severely disrupted. Sometimes the
changes in the genes are of such a negative influence
that the individual has difficulties to live under the
current environmental conditions. And in this case it
has a high probability to die and not to participate in
the reproduction process that forms a future
generation. Nevertheless it can also happen, that the
genetic changes confer benefits, that they lead to
desirable characteristics, which enable the individual
to survive more efficiently than others of its species
do. In this case the individuals chance to spread its
genetic code through following generations
increases.
Indeed, all present species have probably
inherited a whole host of mutations that have
occurred among their ancestors. Inheritance of
parents genes and mutation lead only to slight
changes in the genetic code, as even mutated
offspring is recognizable similar to its parents.
Therefore the evolutionary change is gradual. Solely
at certain specified times the slow tempo of genetic
evolutionary adaptation is punctuated by a fairly
rapid speeding up because of environmental changes.
3.2.2

Artificial GA evolution

The way in which genetic algorithms explore the

search space can be considered analogous to the
basic evolution theory for nature.
The fundamental principles for building an
artificial system that reproduces and mimics the
workings of evolution date back to the biologist
Barricelli who formulated an article about artificial
methods to realize evolutionary processes [3].
Although he intended to support the comprehension
of natural happening, his work was not far away from

the ideas on which Hollands genetic plans were

building [21, 22]. Barricelli proposed selection,
mutation, and production of offspring, either with or
without replacement of a parent, and crossing to be
essential for the evolutionary processes. In a
traditional genetic algorithm individuals are
represented by their chromosomes, which are
encoded by binary bit strings of fixed and equal
length. They are initialized by chance in order to
establish a first generation. Then, based on an
objective function, a fitness test is performed and
every individual is given a fitness score relative to
the fitness of all other individuals. Next a new
population, consisting of the offspring of the actual
one is created. To do so, individuals are randomly
selected out of the current generation. The
probability for such a selection of any individual as a
parent for the next generation is modeled in
proportion to the individuals fitness score, so that
the probability that better fitting individuals are
chosen for mating is higher than the probability to
chose worse competitors. Once it is determined how
often any individual is selected, so to say how often it
mates, each individual is as often paired with
randomly selected other individuals as it itself has
been selected. For each pair one position on the bit
string is randomly chosen and the two individuals
swap all bits either left or right from the selected
position. Afterwards every bit of the two new
chromosomes is inverted with a probability that is
close to zero. The resulting new chromosomes form
the offspring. After pairing has been performed for
all selected individuals the offspring forms the next
generation that then itself is exposed to a fitness test
starting the reproduction process again. This
procedure is repeated until a pre-defined number of
generations is reached. And if some pre-conditions
are met the final generation consists of a large
number of individuals, which are highly adapted to
their environment.
In order to understand the way in which
adaptation works, it is essential to return to the
genetic description of individuals. Any chromosome
on its own is only a piece of information. But in
combination with other chromosomes a new source
for information becomes available. Reflecting on
similarities among the genetic strings this new
information can be expanded inasmuch as patterns in
the strings, so called schemes, can be made out.
Such a schema is a string over the original
alphabet that is extended by a dont care symbol as
a placeholder for a not specified letter. It is of the
same length as a chromosome describing an
individual. Therefore a schema categorizes a class of
similar genetic strings. Especially highly fit schemes
with short-defining length, so called building blocks,

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

are propagated from generation to generation

increasing the number of well adapted individuals
[17]. These building blocks are the lock opener for
Hollands schema theorem that explains that the
expected amount of fit schemes increases from
generation to generation, since remarkably fit
individuals are more likely to pass their genes to the
next generation than less fit ones do.
Pairing, since it disrupts schemes, is the source
for variation and for innovation. In particular
mutation and crossover are those operators on which
variation is build. Crossover generates new schemes
by combining components of successful ones based
on the knowledge of past adaptation. The schemes
obtained are excerpts of the information included in
the original chromosomes. The other operator,
mutation, acts rather blind. Variation through
mutation leads to chromosomes with new and
unknown schemes for which success cannot be
guaranteed.
In particular a GA exhibits several major
characteristics that make it exceptionally attractive:
One of its great advantages is the easy applicability
to changes in a stated problem. A GA is a kind of
self-learning algorithm that can incorporate new
information as characteristics of the search space
change, i.e. if changes occur it can go on using
what it has already learned and can apply the
changes during the following generations in the
sense that if a point in the search space has been
proved useful in the past, it is possible that it will
be useful in a new, but similar situation.
Furthermore a GAs type of search gives it the
capability to escape from local optima, whereas
greedy algorithms may not, i.e. if one individual
becomes trapped on a local optima others avoid
this area of the search space.
The next advantage to be pointed out is that there is
no need for the computation or even the existence
of derivatives. In fact, continuity of the functions is
not required. So a GA can work with a much
broader class of functions than most other
algorithms.
For further details on genetic algorithms refer to
[9, 10, 11]. For a discussion of different operators
and coding schemes refer to [27, 28, 30, 32] and the
references given therein.

3.3

The GA used for network optimization

In our approach we apply a binary coded GA,

which coding scheme reflects a one-gene-one-facility
correspondence on a linear string, which sub-strings
represent different types of facilities. The first
generation is created by chance to produce a large
diversity among the individual networks, i.e. for

every single gene we perform a random experiment,

and decide with a fifty-to-fifty chance whether it is
seeded with 0 or with 1 . Due to the danger of
pre-mature
convergence
no
user-definable
initialization, e.g. heuristic or stochastic a-priori
determination of network alternatives [6, 14], is
applied.
Once the first generation is fully initialized we
perform a fitness proportionate reproduction, i.e.
roulette wheel selection, in combination with an
elitist strategy that copies a pre-defined percentage of
the best networks into the next generation [9, 18].
This enables the search to focus more deeply on
those regions that are already identified as relatively
good in relation to others and to secure that the best
solutions do not get lost within the reproduction
phase. However this strategy can be a source for too
fast convergence towards a possible super network,
i.e. one with much higher fitness than the others in its
population. Options to avoid this are the application
of a ranking system with the expected number of a
networks offspring depending on its rank according
to its fitness value, and being independent of the
fitness magnitude [2], the usage of linear
normalization [9], of fitness scaling [31] or of sharing
functions [16, 26, 25], all three reducing the
difference between the expected number of offspring
among the individuals of one generation, and the
limitation of the number of accepted offspring per
individual depending on the age of the generation.
Applying these methods not only a dominant
individual contributes to the gene pool of future
generations but the others do so as well.
In the version reported here our GA applies
independent single gene mutation, limited to a
Hamming distance of one between the network
before and after mutation,6 and one-point crossover.
The initial probabilities that a network participates at
crossover and at mutation have been set to forty and
to twenty percent, respectively. In addition a fight
operator, evolving on the survival-of-the-fittest
Darwinian principle, and working similar to a
simulated annealing strategy has been implemented.
The probability for its usage is initialized with five
percent.
Naturally, as further insights into the optimization
problem become available there are options to
improve the encoding of the networks phenotypes as
well as the choice of operators, which obviously
depend on one another. However, today it is not clear
whether the objective function is smooth and regular
so that networks with reasonable fitness are similar to
each other in terms of their Hamming distance, or
6

Although this limits the GAs fast exploration of various regions

of the search space it secures that highly fit schema are not
heavily destroyed by mutation.

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

whether we are dealing with an objective function

with many local optima and one global optimum that
might be isolated on a flat surface, i.e. an impulse
function problem. Thus there is the hope that future
experience with the specific problem will guide us in
the development of even better performing operators
and coding schemes.

3.4

Strategy variables

The selection of parameter settings for the GAs

strategic variables is of fundamental concern for the
performance of the algorithm as it influences the
balance7 between exploring the search space and
exploiting the best network alternatives that are
already obtained. A poor choice of values for these
variables can direct the search as well to premature
convergence in sub-optimal solutions as it can lead to
a random walk [20]. For instance increasing the
crossover rate raises the chance to recombine
desirable schema but at the same time it raises the
probability to destroy them, too. Similar twofold is a
rise in the mutation rate. On one hand lost genetic
information is replaced but on the other hand there is
the risk of resulting in a random walk.
During recent years researchers spent quite a lot
of work on finding ideal settings for a GAs strategy
variables. In his Ph.D. thesis De Jong suggested a
population size between fifty and one hundred
individuals in combination with crossover and
mutation rates of sixty and of one-tenth percent
respectively, to be most efficient in his test problems.
These settings were mainly used by many other
researchers because determining settings that are
optimal for a particular problem is often more
difficult and computationally more expensive than
solving the problem with worse parameter
adjustments [8]. Eleven years later, Grefenstette
came up with a parameter set that outperformed De
Jong's choice by improving the average fitness per
generation in the same test problems that were used
by De Jong. Grefenstette's findings that became the
new standard settings very soon were a population
size of thirty individuals, a crossover rate of ninetyfive percent and a mutation rate of one percent. In
1985 Goldberg offered a theoretical study on
specifying fixed population sizes a priori. He
computed an optimum value with regard to the
expected number of new schemata per individual and
defined it depending on the length of the genetic
strings as 1.65 2 0.21length_of_genetic_string , causing immense
exponentially
increasing
population
sizes.
Controversy to this finding, Schaffers empirical tests
7

E.g. selection and fight put pressure on the individuals by

reducing the genetic variation while crossover and especially
mutation are inclined to persevere it.

came to the result that a population size between

twenty and thirty individuals, a crossover rate of
between seventy-five and ninety-five percent and a
mutation rate between a half percent and one percent
were best to gain an optimal performance on average
fitness.
Unfortunately, fixing strategic variables to
optimal values depends strongly on the
characteristics of the unknown search space and what
it even more important: it depends on the actual stage
of the search process [19], since first high quality
regions have to be identified and afterwards these
need to be inspected [4]. From this it follows
immediately that it is best to modify their values
dynamically.
Now, the idea to dynamically reorganize the
relation between strategic variables' values is not
new. It was already published during the late 80's.
Since then many articles arose, dealing with the
construction of self-adapting values, based on control
mechanisms and on knowledge bases. Davis
suggested applying an operator in proportion to the
performance of the offspring it produces. His
suggestion was to calculate the fitness of an offspring
whenever an operator has been used and to increase
the frequency of using this specific operator if the
fitness of the offspring produced is higher than that
of the currently best member of the population [8]. In
1993 Xu and Vukovich suggested fuzzy rules for
altering strategic parameters [34]. Following
Goldbergs suggestion to include online populationsizing techniques [16] they focused on rules to
determine the crossover rate depending on the actual
population size and on the age of the generation.
In the course of the optimization described here
we use a very similar approach as we dynamically
modify the setting of strategic variables based on a
set of rules, which are comparable to those identified
by Lee and Takagi [23], except that we keep the
population size constant.

3.5

Pre-optimization

From the explanation given above it is obvious

that the length of each genetic string characterizing
an individual recycling network can turn out to be
that large that the obtainment of beneficing solutions
in reasonable time becomes questionable. In order to
reduce the number of optional locations for
dismantling facilities, which need to be examined in
more detail within the optimization process, a preoptimization stage has been introduced. This first
first-order analysis is used as an approximation to
the real problem. It assumes continuous locations for
~ n dismantling
a pre-given number of 1 < m

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

facilities, whereas the specifications of zones and of

ELVs supplied in these zones remain unchanged.
In this stage only inbound transport cost at a
dismantling facility are considered and hence the task
~
m

s c dist (Z , F ) s
n

is to minimize the term

ij

i =1 j =1

with the interpretation of the variables being the

same as in chapter 2.1. To do so we group the single
~
representative supply points into a number of m
clusters, each represented by a two-dimensional
vector giving the location of an associated facility, so
that the sum of weighted distances is minimized.
The Fuzzy-C means algorithm, based on the
iterative minimization of an objective function is one
of the best known and best performing fuzzy
clustering algorithms [5, 33, 35]. It is used in a wide
field of applications and it excellently fits to the task
at hand [24, 31].
The grade, to which zone Z i ELVs belong to
each cluster, i.e. the portion of zone Z i ELVs that are
~ , is
shipped to each dismantler F j , 1 j m
~ fuzzy membership matrix
represented by a n m
~
~
nm
nm
s( ) [0, 1] R , where N 0 refers to the
number of iterations. This matrix is referred to as a
fuzzy partition. The component situated in the i th
row and in the j th column of s ( ) is sij ( ) [0, 1] R

denoting the above mentioned grade. Obviously for

each column in s ( ) it has to be ensured that
~
m

s ( ) = 1 so that every zones ELVs are completely

ij

j =1

shared among the facilities.

Although there are other possibilities, like using
a-priori knowledge about the relation between supply
points, we create the initial fuzzy partition by chance.
Once the first partition is available the iteration is
initiated with the computation of cluster centers, i.e.
the
location
of
dismantling
facilities

((s ( ))
n

Fj ( + 1) :=

ij

i =1

Zi

(s ( ))
n

~ . It commences by
, 1 j m

ij

i =1

updating

s ( + 1) ,

i.e.

~
m dist Fj ( + 1), Z i
sij ( + 1) :=
~
j =1 dist F~j ( + 1), Z i

by
2
1

calculating

+
, R . Note

that the closer the value of is to one, the more

crisp the partition will be ( sij ( ) , {0, 1} ) and
1

the higher its value is the more fuzzy the partition

1
can be expected ( sij ( ) ~ ). This procedure is
m

iterated until a pre-defined stop criterion is reached.

In a next step the network that has been obtained

is evaluated in terms of transport cost, environmental
impact, average distance, entropy and partition
coefficient. Before further usage it can be modified
manually by the decision-makers, e.g. it can be
combined with additional, already existing, licensed
and non-licensed dismantling facilities. The network
of dismantling facilities generated this way defines
the set F as it is employed during GA optimization.

4 Results and next steps

The step before starting the optimization of a
recycling and recovery network is to verify the
efficiency of the chosen problem solving approach.
In this paper we focus on the possible benefit of the
pre-optimization stage. In order to verify the
usefulness of this stage two different experiments are
chosen to compare results which are obtained with
and without the pre-optimization.
In the first experiment we start with the preoptimization stage and use the results of this stage as
input data for the GA optimization. Therefore the GA
in this experiment can chose only from the subset of
facilities which is given by the pre-optimization. In
the second experiment only GA is used to optimize
the recycling network, so that it is able to chose from
the complete set of facilities. In both experiments the
GA optimizes recycling networks with no retraction
facilities and with a subset of the most important
second level facilities S k . Both experiments use the
same GA optimization parameters and have the same
total time for optimization. This means that the time
which is taken in experiment 1 for the preoptimization is given as additional time for the GA in
experiment 2.
In table 1 is a short description of the two
experiments:
Table 1. Experiment description
Experiment 1
Experiment 2
Selection of dismantler No pre-optimization
subset Fpre with Fuzzy
C-means algorithm
GA optimization with GA optimization with all
input Fpre and second dismantlers
Fj
and
level facilities S k
second level facilities S
k

There are three scenarios with different numbers

of ELV zones Z i , different numbers of possible
facilities F j and different numbers of possible
second level facilities S k . Because of the GAs
stochastic characteristics every experiment is
repeated three to five times (depending on the
scenario size) to get an average solution for each

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Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2004

combination of scenario and experiment. Table 2

gives the main parameters of each scenario, table 3
shows the results of all optimization runs.
Table 2. Scenario description
Scenario

No. of ELVs

20,041

25,434 132,508

No. of ELV zones Z i

712

2,384

8,351

No. of facilities F j

103

157

873

39

No. of second level

facilities S k

Table 3. Results summary

Average cost

a low mutation parameter. Further experiments have

shown that the GA performance can be improved by
increasing the mutation parameter.
In the future further research to improve the
optimization results will be done. Main tasks will
focus on adapting the GA parameters, splitting the
linear GA string into substrings, one for each facility
type, and reduce total scenario size by aggregating
the ELV zones into a few number of ELV clusters.

References

Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Scenario 1

100%

116%

Scenario 2

100%

134%

Scenario 3

100%

333%

It is not possible to show absolute cost values,

therefore results of experiment 1 are normalized to
100% and results of experiment 2 are set in relation
to experiment 1 results.
In all scenarios experiment 1 finds better
solutions than experiment 2 and the gap increases
with the scenario size. While the average gap
between experiment 1 and experiment 2 is low in
scenario 1 (16%), it increases to 34% in scenario 2
and reaches 233% in scenario 3. As a conclusion of
this experiments it is obvious that the preoptimization stage is important for the optimization
approach, especially for large scenarios.
The optimization runs also show that it is
necessary to adapt the chosen GA parameters
especially for large scenarios. In Table 4 the cost
reduction from the first GA iteration8 to the final
result is shown.
Table 4. Cost reduction during GA
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Experiment 1

Experiment 2

Scenario 1

52%

64%

Scenario 2

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43%

Scenario 3

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1%

In both experiment 1 and 2 the GA improves the

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8

the same way as in scenarios 1 and 2, only the GA

for experiment 2, scenario 3 is not able to improve
the starting solution significantly. The reason for this
poor performance is the large number of possible
facilities F j in this scenario in combination with too

The starting iteration always contains several reasonable

solutions.

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