Formulation and solution technique for agricultural waste collection and transport network design

Trung Hieu Tran, Thu Ba T. Nguyen, Hoa Sen T. Le and Duc Chinh Phung

European Journal of Operational Research, 2024, vol. 313, issue 3, 1152-1169

Abstract: Agricultural waste management in developing countries has become a challenging issue for rural planners due to the lack of an efficient planning tool. In the countries, farmers burnt agricultural waste at fields after each harvesting season to solve the issue. As a result, it has caused air and water pollution in the rural areas of the countries. In this paper, we present a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model for agricultural waste collection and transport network design that aims to stop burning waste and use the waste to produce bio-organic fertilizer. The model supports rural planners to optimally locate waste storages, and to determine the optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles to collect and transport the waste from the storages to the bio-organic fertilizer production facility. In the novel location-assignment-routing problem, the overall objective is to minimize total cost of locating storages, collecting waste from fields and planning vehicle routes. A solution technique is developed to linearise the mixed-integer nonlinear programming model into a model in linear form. In addition, a parallel water flow algorithm is developed to solve efficiently the large-sized instances. The efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm is validated and evaluated on the real case study in Trieu Phong district, Quang Tri province, Vietnam, as well as a set of randomly generated large-sized instances. The results show that our solution approach outperforms the general optimisation solver and tabu search algorithm. Our algorithm can find the optimal or near-optimal solutions for the large-sized instances within a reasonable time.

Keywords: OR in agriculture; Location-assignment-routing problem; Mathematical programming; Water flow algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221723006811
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:313:y:2024:i:3:p:1152-1169

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2023.08.052

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().