Location analysis of intermediate facilities within a waste management system

Abstract

This report presents an introduction to municipal solid waste management and a thorough lit- erature review on how to optimise locations of Intermediate Facilities in order to improve the waste management system as a whole. The importance of waste management is underlined in the introduction, together with justi cations on using Operations Research to optimise waste manage- ment. The waste management system is described and the importance of Intermediate Facilities is highlighted. The unique scenario of the problem is explained and how the problem will be solved in colabotration with the CSIR. In the literature review the problem is considered from the grass routes up and shown to be a Location Arc Routing Problem (LARP). The methods for solving the problem through heuristics are then discussed. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) heursitic is selected to solve the LARP and is lastly tested and taylored towards benchmark problems. The GA proved to be competent in solving the LARP, but had much randomness present in the model.