A MILP model for the municipal solid waste selective collection routing problem

Abstract

Nowadays, selective solid waste management in the European Union belongs to important responsibilities of municipalities. In Solid Waste Management (SWM) the main operational task is to set a schedule for solid waste collection and to find optimal routes for garbage trucks, so that the total costs of the solid waste collection service can be minimized, subject to a series of constraints which not only guarantee the fulfillment of the SWM's obligations but also ensure the desirable quality level of that service. The optimization in garbage truck routing belongs to so called rich Vehicle Routing Problems as it aims to cover the following constraints: pickup nodes (clients) must be visited during their predefined time windows, the number and capacity of depots and specialized sorting units cannot be exceeded, each garbage truck can be assigned to at most one depot, each route should be dedicated to collecting one type of segregated solid waste, and the route must be served by a garbage truck which can collect that type of solid waste, the availability of garbage trucks and their drivers must be respected, each garbage truck must be drained at a specialized sorting unit before going back to the depot. This paper contributes a newly developed Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) model for the Municipal Solid Waste Selective Collection Routing Problem (MSWSCRP) with time windows, limited heterogeneous fleet, and different types of segregated solid waste to be collected separately. Results obtained for solving small-sized instance of the MSWSCRP are reported.