Tactical waste collection: column generation and mixed integer programming based heuristics

Abstract

Environmental considerations and corresponding legislation cause a shift from waste management to materials management, requiring efficient collection of these flows. This paper develops a model for building tactical waste collection schemes in which a set of capacitated vehicles visits a set of customers during a given time period. Each vehicle must visit the disposal facility to discharge the waste after each customer visit. This is motivated by the fact that the waste of each customer has to be weighed at the disposal facility. The goal is to find a set of routes for each vehicle that satisfy both the demand and the frequency constraints and minimize the total cost. Since a state-of-the-art solver could not find a solution with a reasonable gap within an acceptable time limit, a column generation and a mixed integer programming based heuristic are proposed. While the mixed integer programming based heuristic outperforms the column generation heuristic in terms of solution quality, the lower bound provided by column generation allows to prove the small optimality gaps of the solutions obtained. Moreover, by applying both heuristics on instances derived from real-life data, they proved to be capable of finding good quality solutions in small computation times.

Improving the tactical planning of solid waste collection with prescriptive analytics: a case study

“…With this paper, we aim at two contributions. The first one illustrating how tactical decision making in waste collection planning can be done using a multimethodology approach that combines several analytical tools previously presented in the literature (Simonetto & Borenstein, 2007;Li et al, 2008;Van Engeland & Beliën, 2021). Contributing in this way to enrich the scarce literature of tactical planning for these systems and to show the potential benefits that can be achieved using these tools in a real-world application.…”

“…Initially, we formulated a mathematical programming model for this decision (Vargas et al, 2020). Being NP-hard (Van Engeland & Beliën, 2021), this sort of truck allocation and sequencing problems are intractable. Therefore, a commercial optimizer was unable to find even a feasible solution in reasonable times.…”

“…Finally, the operational level mainly focuses on detailed routing of collection vehicles and personnel scheduling. As pointed out by Van Engeland & Beliën (2021) tactical decisions are seldom studied in these systems. Most research aim at collection routing planning (Beliën et al, 2014) and studies including transfer stations mainly focus on their location (Ghiani et al, 2014).…”

Transportation Risk Control of Waste Disposal in the Healthcare System with Two-Echelon Waste Collection Network

“…e two extensions could be of importance in waste collection, which is used as the basis of our research. Van Engeland and Beliën [7] study waste collection with capacitated vehicles in time windows, in which vehicle must visit the disposal facility to discharge the waste after each customer visit. e routing decision is made to minimise total cost, and a column generation algorithm as well as a heuristic are proposed.…”