Conference Agenda

The environmental hazards of improperly managed waste have gained universal recognition among scholars and stakeholders. These hazards are especially critical in the pharmaceutical sector since leftover medications contain active chemicals that threaten the environment and human health. Nonetheless, implementation of adequate measures to ensure proper collection and treatment of pharmaceutical leftovers remains insufficient, and tons of unwanted medications are discarded in landfills and wastewater annually. Such outcomes are due to lack of coordination between the parties involved and poor incentive systems in place. To address this issue, we study coordination in pharmaceutical reverse supply chains and government incentive strategies. We employ the evolutionary game methodology to evaluate strategic behaviour of pharmacies and a waste recycler under different incentive plans. We are focusing on both reward- and awareness-driven customer segments to boost the return volume of unwanted medications. Moreover, supply chain coordination is investigated as a tool to enhance the economic viability of the system. We compare the incentive plans based on return volume, participation rate, budget spend, and implementation time, to recommend the most effective plan. An extensive numerical study provides insights into the performance of the incentive plans in different conditions. The results reveal that a plan that provides proper incentives to pharmacies for targeting both, reward- and awareness-driven customers, coupled with contract-based coordination, outperforms other plans, and does not necessarily require a budget allocation. Our study is motivated by the UK’s National Health System but it is generalisable to pharmaceutical reverse supply chains in other countries as well.

A real world problem from the consumer goods' label printing industry is considered which differs from the well-known Label Printing or Cover Printing Problems by additionally respecting color constraints. Several sorts of similar labels have to printed on parallel lanes of a quasi-endless roll of paper using different printing plates. The various sorts need different colors, which have to be installed in the printer's limited number of color slots. Both changing the colors and designing the plates incur fixed costs. Because all lanes have to be printed simultaneously and because demands of the sorts are heterogeneous, waste may occur which causes variable costs per unnecessarily printed label. It has to be decided how many and which printing plates to design, how long to run each plate and how to change the colors in the slots so that demand is fulfilled while total costs are minimized. Two linear mixed integer programming (MIP) formulations and several decomposition heuristics are suggested to model and solve this problem. Various numerical experiments using practically relevant data test both MIP formulations, gain structural insights into the problem's and the MIP formulations' characteristics and compare the different heuristics.

The continuous casting (CC) and hot rolling (HR) stages are among the most energy-intensive in steel production. This is mainly due to the fact that the planning and scheduling of both processes are largely decoupled from each other. As a result, the majority of slabs cool down significantly after CC, while waiting for further processing. Just before HR these slabs must be reheated to the required process temperature of approximately 1200°C. Integrated planning of both processes can help minimize waiting times and boost energy efficiency by increasing the proportion of hot charged slabs. The challenge lies in reconciling the various incompatible process restrictions of CC and HR. To address this issue, we propose an aggregated mixed-integer linear model for the integrated planning problem. Steel grade upgrades are used to provide additional flexibility in mitigating the effects of incompatible process restrictions. Based on a numerical case study, we examine three upgrading strategies, assessing their impact on productivity and energy efficiency. The findings demonstrate the potential of upgradeability in the context of integrated planning.