On Demand Waste Collection for Smart Cities: A Case Study

Abstract

The neat and clean surrounding is the main driving force for any city to be called a smart city. In order to address current societal and business challenges, the objective is to provide a solution to enable collection-on-demand of wastes by connecting waste data and users/customers with the waste management system. In that context, the focus is to improve the waste collection process in terms of collection cost, collection time, and CO2. Within the overall objective, an important goal that needs to be solved is waste collection on demand and the present paper addresses this by tackling the optimization problem related to the routing. Application of the presented solution to a case study with real data collected in the municipality of Ålesund, Norway, is presented. This study also shows a comparison of three popular optimization algorithms for solving vehicle routing problems (VRP) and multiple vehicle routing problems (MVRP), to identify a suitable algorithm for the case study, introducing a data-driven model. Five constraints with alternative objectives of distance and cost minimization are considered.