Simulation of the night shift solid waste collection system of phuket municipality

Abstract

This research was conducted in order to simulate the night shift solid waste collection system of Phuket Municipality, Thailand. The Phuket Municipality faced the problems of residualwaste and an unbalanced load for solidwaste collection teams. The waste management committee of Phuket Municipality wanted to improve the solid waste collection system to run more efficiently. This research analyzed the volume of solid waste collection instead of the weight, and has separated the solid waste collection points into 11 “types”. The data was collected from the survey form. Minitab 16.1 was used to analyze and test the data distribution, and then used them to build themodel.MicrosoftVisual C++was used to build the simulationmodel,which was then verified and validated extensively. The model represented the actual night shift solid waste collection system of Phuket Municipality. The heuristic approach was then employed to apply new assigned zones and routings. The results from the study of the new system of night shift solid waste collection system of Phuket Municipality shows that there is no residual waste and no unbalanced load between solid waste collection teams. The new system works effectively and can decrease the total number of trips for solid waste collection by 9.1% and the average distance and time for the solid waste collection system are decreased by 7.42% and 7.10% respectively.