Waste collection routing—limited multiple landfills and heterogeneous fleet

Abstract

This article deals with a real-life waste collection routing problem. To efficiently plan waste collection, large municipalities may be partitioned into convenient sectors and only then can routing problems be solved in each sector. Three diverse situations are described, resulting in three different new models. In the first situation, there is a single point of waste disposal from where the vehicles depart and to where they return. The vehicle fleet comprises three types of collection vehicles. In the second, the garage does not match any of the points of disposal. The vehicle is unique and the points of disposal (landfills or transfer stations) may have limitations in terms of the number of visits per day. In the third situation, disposal points are multiple (they do not coincide with the garage), they are limited in the number of visits, and the fleet is composed of two types of vehicles. Computational results based not only on instances adapted from the literature but also on real cases are presented and analyzed. In particular, the results also show the effectiveness of combining sectorization and routing to solve waste collection problems.

Sectors and Routes in Solid Waste Collection

“…As previously stated, only the case with one vehicle is addressed. The situation with different vehicles is presented by the authors in [46].…”

“…The volume of each container was calculated considering the fact that, on average, containers are not completely full and vehicles have a system that compresses the waste collected. This paper only considers the case of one vehicle but in [46] a model with two types of vehicles is presented. Vehicles with different capacities, different costs and other specific characteristics such as dedicated containers.…”

“…Each vehicle is responsible for collecting waste in each sector. The model for the arc routing problem linked to the case study is presented in [46].…”

“…The Mixed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem with Limited Multi-Landfills (MCARP-LML) is an MCARP with multiple landfills ( [44] and [46]) some of which with a limited number of visits for waste disposal. The objective is to minimize the cost of travels between the landfill/transfer station and the garage or depot, while the demand is met without exceeding the capacity of the vehicle.…”

An updated annotated bibliography on arc routing problems

“…Rodrigues and Ferreira work with the MCARP in order to address scenarios with a heterogeneous fleet, multiple landfills with a limited capacity or a combination of both. They begin with a sectoring phase (which will be detailed in Section 3.7.3), and the routing phase is then executed by extending the mixed integer programming model of to cope with the three above‐mentioned extensions.…”