Optimal routing of waste collection vehicles

Abstract

Waste management forms an essential part of any municipality's service towards the public. This includes the collection, transport and disposal of solid waste. This paper aims at improving the transportation side of municipality’s waste management by improving the routing efficiency of their vehicles. In literature, the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) is used to address problems related to the optimising of waste collection routes. However, the basic CARP can be too simplistic to accurately represent reality. To overcome this limitation the basic CARP is extended to tackle several extensions that can be experienced in a real world Waste Collection Problems. A generic Tabu Search (TS) Algorithm is proposed for the design of a model that can be used to solve the WCP. The results obtained from testing the model on several benchmark problems indicate the model's capability to improve waste collection routes. This project is a step toward solving more general real live WCPs.