EURO 2024 Copenhagen
Abstract Submission

EURO-Online login

2761. Tactical Planning Considering Different Levels of Flexibility for a Waste Collection Routing Problem

Invited abstract in session TC-58: Waste Collection, stream VeRoLog - Vehicle Routing and Logistics.

Tuesday, 12:30-14:00
Room: S07 (building: 101)

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Christina Hess
Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna
2. Alina-Gabriela Dragomir
Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna
3. Karl Doerner
Department of Business Decisions and Analytics, University of Vienna

Abstract

The planning of waste collection operations typically involves a series of tactical and operational decisions. This work is concerned with studying tactical decisions related to waste collection schedules and the use of intermediate facilities for unloading waste, while optimizing route planning at the operational level. The real-world inspired waste collection problem at hand can be modelled as a periodic vehicle routing problem with intermediate facilities. Vehicles based at a central depot collect waste from different locations and visit incinerators en route, when they are full, and at the end of each tour to replenish their capacity. The planning horizon is several days or weeks and, as plans should be repeatable, a periodic plan is established. In order to provide decision support to practitioners at both operational and tactical levels, we investigate more flexible collection schedules and flexibility in the use of intermediate facilities and their allocation to vehicle routes, considering minimum quotas and maximum capacities. The aim is to minimize overall transportation costs while avoiding overflows of the waste bins. The problem is solved using an adaptive large neighborhood search with problem-specific operators and a local search strategy. We present computational results on benchmark instances from the literature and on a set of real-world inspired instances from the city of Vienna showing the effects of allowing more flexibility in planning.

Keywords

Status: accepted

Back to the list of papers