Published our work about Smart Waste Management in the Waste Management journal

Find the article here or here (Zenodo repository) and cite as: Rossit, D. G., Toutouh, J., & Nesmachnow, S. (2020). Exact and heuristic approaches for multi-objective garbage accumulation points location in real scenarios. Waste Management, 105, 467-481. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2020.02.016

Exact and heuristic approaches for multi-objective garbage accumulation points location in real scenarios

Abstract

Municipal solid waste management is a major challenge for nowadays urban societies, because it accounts for a large proportion of public budget and, when mishandled, it can lead to environmental and social problems. This work focuses on the problem of locating waste bins in an urban area, which is considered to have a strong influence in the overall efficiency of the reverse logistic chain. This article contributes with an exact multiobjective approach to solve the waste bin location in which the optimization criteria that are considered are: the accessibility to the system (as quality of service measure), the investment cost, and the required frequency of waste removal from the bins (as a proxy of the posterior routing costs). In this approach, different methods to obtain the objectives ideal and nadir values over the Pareto front are proposed and compared. Then, a family of heuristic methods based on the PageRank algorithm is proposed which aims to optimize the accessibility to the system, the amount of collected waste and the installation cost. The experimental evaluation was performed on real-world scenarios of the cities of Montevideo, Uruguay, and Bahía Blanca, Argentina. The obtained results show the competitiveness of the proposed approaches for constructing a set of candidate solutions that considers the different trade-offs between the optimization criteria.

Highlights

• Suitable location of waste bins is crucial for waste management.
• Different criteria need to be considered for optimizing bins location.
• Mathematical programming methods need to be adapted for dealing with this problem.
• PageRank-based heuristics are fast in obtaining locations of waste bins.
• Proposed approaches were able to solve real scenarios of two different cities.