Municipal Solid Waste Management: A Case Study Utilizing DES and GIS

Abstract

This research aims to compare two well-known solution methodologies, namely Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Discrete Event Simulation (DES), which are used to design, analyze, and optimize the solid waste management system based on the locations of the garbage bins. A significant finding of the study was that the application of the simulation methodology for a geographical area of a size of 278 km2 was challenging in that the addition of the geographical conditions to the developed model proved to be time-consuming. On the other hand, the simulation model that was developed without adding geographical conditions revealed that the number of bins could be reduced by 60.3% depending on the population size and garbage density. However, this model could not be implemented since the required walking distance was higher than 75 m, which is greater than the distance the residents could be reasonably expected to travel to reach a bin. Thus, using a cutoff value of 75 m, the total number of bins can be reduced by 30% on average with regard to the result obtained from the GIS-based solution. This can lead to an annual cost reduction of 93.706 € on average in the collection process and carbon dioxide release reduction of 18% on average.