Adaptation of simulated annealing to an integrated municipal solid waste location-routing problem

Abstract

This paper aims to propose an integrated municipal solid waste management network covering multiple types of wastes concurrently and utilise a location-routing problem framework to minimise the establishment cost of interrelated facilities (i.e., transfer stations; treatment, recycling and disposal centres) in the network and the transportation cost of wastes in the entire network. The defined problem consists of the concurrent site selection of the locations of the system's all facilities among the candidate locations and the determination of routes and amount of shipments among the selected facilities to minimise the total cost of transportation and facility establishment. As the addressed problem exhibits the non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness (NP-hardness), an adaptation of the simulated annealing algorithm is proposed in this paper. The experiment results, when compared with the exact solutions obtained by mixed-integer programming in terms of solution fitness and computing time, imply that the employed algorithm works effectively and efficiently.