Waste collection vehicle routing problem considering similarity pattern of trashcan and garbage unloading

Abstract

Rapid urbanization poses a serious environmental threat of solid waste management (SWM) and reverse supply chain. In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed in order to reduce the cost of waste collection and transporting for recycling process. First a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is provided including a waste collection routing problem and the following processes after garbage unloading, so that, there is a balance between the distance between trashcans, and the similarity of the trashcans in terms of the types of waste which is in the trashcans, in order to select the optimal route for each garbage transport vehicles. For this purpose, a similarity pattern is designed. By following the similarity pattern for route selection, recovery rate of waste will be increased being shown in the model. Then, we solved the model by using LINGO 0.9 software and analyze the output results of solved model.