Investigating the economic returns of mobile heat storage devices in the multi-stage closed-loop supply chain

Recovery of the industrial waste heat is a cost-effective and environmentally friendly approach for the energy supply in cities. The industrial waste heat supply chain is a typical multi-objective closed-loop system that aims at optimizing both the economic and environmental benefits through proper operations during supply, purchase, distribution, and consumption. Different from conventional waste heat recovery (WHR), the mobile waste heat recovery (M-WHR) implanted recovery vehicles to facility heat collection and distribution. As a new and cost-sensitive channel for the WHR industry, the dynamic supply chain of the M-WHR has seldom been studied. This study proposed a numerical model to investigate such a dynamic system and conducted a case study to verify the models. The results suggested that by optimizing the production plan based on the market demand, the supply chain can reach the Pareto state and minimize its production cost and idle production recourses. The results of the designed numerical examples verify the robustness of the operation strategy. Also, with proper government subsidies, the investment in constructing the WHR supply chain is profitable and the payback period can be reduced.