Abstract
Health-care waste (HCW) is a special category of refuse generated when providing health care and can comprise materials with infectious and/or toxic characteristics. The disposal of this waste involves its transport from health-care facilities to treatment centers. This step can be threatening to humans and the environment if not managed with the utmost care. To ensure the safe management of HCW, this article proposes a new model for HCW transportation that separates hazardous from non-hazardous waste along the transportation route. The proposed model is based on the multi-compartment vehicle routing problem, where each type of waste is carried in a dedicated compartment, and the objective is to minimize the total route cost. Considering the NP-hardness of the problem, an adaptive genetic algorithm is proposed based on the results of statistical pre-post testing of the population. The experimental study, conducted on benchmark instances and real data instances, show the efficiency of the proposed approach against state-of-the-art algorithms.
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