Large-scale adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve air quality in large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles County. Nonetheless, alongside the benefits from electrification, a significant amount of EV batteries is expected to retire within five years, posing environmental and economic challenges regarding management and disposal. Incorporating secondary use and recycling for EV batteries and implementing a closed-loop supply chain network is a promising strategy. The core idea is to enhance battery utilization and reuse valuable resources, thereby increasing the sustainability and economic viability of the network. Although the existing literature has extensively studied the general closed-loop supply chain network design, none of them is specifically designed for the case of EV batteries, let alone the incorporation of battery secondary use. In this research, the researchers will develop a comprehensive framework that jointly optimizes the long-term infrastructure planning and short-term operational execution of a closed-loop EV battery supply chain network. The solution framework will consider spatial and temporal uncertainties from used battery supply and secondary use demand to address system resilience and minimize the GHG emissions during network implementation and operations to achieve sustainability. Additionally, the researchers will propose a Lagrangian-based scenario decomposition strategy and a variant Benders decomposition algorithm to accelerate the computation so that the framework can be applied to real-world problem sizes.
