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Due to increasing awareness on the treatment of end-of-use/life products, disassembly has been a fast-growing research area of interest for many researchers over recent decades. This paper introduces a novel lot-sizing problem that has not been studied in the literature, which is the service-parts lot-sizing with disassembly option. The disassembly option implies that the demands of service parts can be fulfilled by newly manufactured parts, but also by disassembled parts. The disassembled parts are the ones recovered after the disassembly of end-of-use/life products. The objective of the considered problem is to maximize the total profit, i.e., the revenue of selling the service parts minus the total cost of the fixed setup, production, disassembly, inventory holding, and disposal over a planning horizon. This paper proves that the single-period version of the considered problem is NP-hard and suggests a heuristic by combining a simulated annealing algorithm and a linear-programming relaxation. Computational experiment results show that the heuristic generates near-optimal solutions within reasonable computation time, which implies that the heuristic is a viable optimization tool for the service parts inventory management. In addition, sensitivity analyses indicate that deciding an appropriate price of disassembled parts and an appropriate collection amount of EOLs are very important for sustainable service parts systems.

It is highly challenging to measure the efficiency of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) because factors affecting operational characteristics of EVCSs are time-varying in practice. For the efficiency measurement, environmental factors around the EVCSs can be considered because such factors affect charging behaviors of electric vehicle drivers, resulting in variations of accessibility and attractiveness for the EVCSs. Considering dynamics of the factors, this paper examines the technical efficiency of 622 electric vehicle charging stations in Seoul using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The DEA is formulated as a multi-period output-oriented constant return to scale model. Five inputs including floating population, number of nearby EVCSs, average distance of nearby EVCSs, traffic volume and traffic congestion are considered and the charging frequency of EVCSs is used as the output. The result of efficiency measurement shows that not many EVCSs has most of charging demand at certain periods of time, while the others are facing with anemic charging demand. Tobit regression analyses show that the traffic congestion negatively affects the efficiency of EVCSs, while the traffic volume and the number of nearby EVCSs are positive factors improving the efficiency around EVCSs. We draw some notable characteristics of efficient EVCSs by comparing means of the inputs related to the groups classified by K-means clustering algorithm. This analysis presents that efficient EVCSs can be generally characterized with the high number of nearby EVCSs and low level of the traffic congestion.

Evaluating the operational efficiency of electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) is important to understand charging network evolution and the charging behavior of electric vehicle users. However, aggregation of efficiency performance metrics poses a significant challenge to practitioners and researchers. In general, the operational efficiency of EVCSs can be measured as a complicated function of various factors with multiple criteria. Such a complex aspect of managing EVCSs becomes one of the challenging issues to measure their operational efficiency. Considering the difficulty in the efficiency measurement, this paper suggests a way to measure the operational efficiency of EVCSs based on data envelopment analysis (DEA). The DEA model is formulated as constant returns of output-oriented model with five types of inputs, four of them are the numbers of floating population and nearby charging stations, distance of nearby charging stations and traffic volume as desirable inputs and the other is the traffic speed in congestion as undesirable one. Meanwhile, the output is given by the charging frequency of EVCSs in a day. Using real-world data obtained from reliable sources, we suggest operational efficiencies of EVCSs in Seoul and discuss implications on the development of electric vehicle charging network. The result of efficiency measurement shows that most of EVCSs in Seoul are inefficient, while some districts (Nowon-gu, Dongdaemun-gu, Dongjak-gu, Songpa-gu, Guro-gu) have relatively more efficient EVCSs than the others.

The vehicle routing problem is one of the vibrant research problems for half a century. Many studies have extensively studied the vehicle routing...

In South Korea, Jeju Island has a role as a test bed for electric vehicles (EVs). All conventional cars on the island are supposed to be replaced with EVs by 2030. Accordingly, how to effectively set up EV charging stations (EVCSs) that can charge EVs is an urgent research issue. In this paper, we present a case study on planning the locations of EVCS for Jeju Island, South Korea. The objective is to determine where EVCSs to be installed so as to balance the load of EVCSs while satisfying demands. For a public service with EVCSs by some government or non-profit organization, load balancing between EVCS locations may be one of major measures to evaluate or publicize the associated service network. Nevertheless, this measure has not been receiving much attention in the related literature. Thus, we consider the measure as a constraint and an objective in a mixed integer programming model. The model also considers the maximum allowed distance that drivers would detour to recharge their EV instead of using the shortest path to their destination. To solve the problem effectively, we develop a heuristic algorithm. With the proposed heuristic algorithm, a variety of numerical analysis is conducted to identify effects of the maximum allowed detour distance and the tightness of budget for installing EVCSs. From the analysis, we discuss the effects and draw practical implications.