Residential waste management in South Africa: Optimisation of vehicle fleet size and composition

Abstract

The collection of solid waste is a highly discernible and important municipal service. Despite this fact, municipalities still make use of ine ective measures that are costly to sustain. The basic nature of our problem is that of a Capacitated Arc Routing Problem with Vehicle Site Dependencies. We present a Vehicle Decomposition Algorithm capable of determining the collection routes and the vehicle eet size and composition for a eet of waste collection vehicles with the objective of minimising the total cost incurred. Each vehicle class within the

eet may be constrained from traversing or servicing certain street segments due to limitations such as physical dimensions. A sensitivity analysis is performed to determine the optimal parameter values for use in the algorithm. The Vehicle Decomposition Algorithm is tested on three example problems and results are presented.