Sustainable smart waste classification and collection system: A bi-objective modeling and optimization approach

Abstract

In the context of the “smart city”, information and communication technologies (ICT) have become indispensable in the planning and design of modern municipal solid waste management. Due to more waste varieties, there are urgent calls to implement waste classification worldwide, which promotes resource recycling to achieve sustainable development. In this paper, we present an ICT-based smart waste classification and collection system (SWCCS) that is abstracted as a bi-objective mathematical programming model to optimize the waste collection problem. To implement the proposed SWCCS effectively, we design a novel multi-objective hybrid algorithm based on the whale optimization and genetic algorithms (MOGWOA) with an improved convergence factor and a fast, non-dominated sorting method. A comparison of our algorithm with two classical multi-objective algorithms on generated test instances and on a real-world case shows that the proposed MOGWOA is more effective for optimizing the established model. This paper demonstrates how the ICT-based SWCCS works and how it can help sanitation companies improve waste collection both economically and environmentally.