Waste collection under uncertainty: a simheuristic based on variable neighbourhood search

Aljoscha Gruler, Carlos L. Quintero-Araújo, Laura Calvet and Angel Juan

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2017, vol. 11, issue 2, 228-255

Abstract: Ongoing population growth in cities and increasing waste production has made the optimisation of urban waste management a critical task for local governments. Route planning in waste collection can be formulated as an extended version of the well-known vehicle routing problem, for which a wide range of solution methods already exist. Despite the fact that real-life applications are characterised by high uncertainty levels, most works on waste collection assume deterministic inputs. In order to partially close this literature gap, this paper first proposes a competitive metaheuristic algorithm based on a variable neighbourhood search framework for the deterministic waste collection problem. Then, this metaheuristic is extended to a simheuristic algorithm in order to deal with the stochastic problem version. This extension is achieved by integrating simulation into the metaheuristic framework, which also allows a closer risk analysis of the best-found stochastic solutions. Different computational experiments illustrate the potential of our methodology. [Received: 13 January 2016; Revised: 25 April 2016; Revised: 19 September 2016; Revised: 18 October 2016; Accepted: 25 October 2016]

Keywords: waste collection management; vehicle routing problem; VRP; risk assessment; simulation; metaheuristics; stochastic optimisation; simheuristics; uncertainty; variable neighbourhood search; cities; urban waste management; local government; simulation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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