A waste collection problem with service type option

Abstract

Efficient solid waste management is one of the most relevant issues for urban communities. With regard to the service type of household waste collection, there are two approaches in practice: when collecting household waste via a door-to-door system, the collection vehicles drive down all the streets to empty the garbage cans on the curb. Using a bring system, waste is accumulated at central collection sites with a larger capacity. While residents do have to travel an additional distance to dispose of their waste at these central collection sites, a bring system can reduce the distance to be covered by collection vehicles because they no longer have to drive down all the streets. To combine the advantages of both systems, in this article the service type decision is introduced. The corresponding waste collection problem with service type option (WCPSTO) is modeled as a new variant of a periodic location routing problem and an adaptive large neighborhood search-based solution approach is proposed. This solution approach not only solves the newly presented problem, but also outperforms a solution algorithm for a related waste collection problem seen in the literature, which can be seen as a special case of the WCPSTO.