Multi-compartment vehicle routing problem for waste collection in smart cities

Abstract

To the rapid increase in urbanization, the volume of municipal solid waste is increasing every day, causing garbage cans to overflow and subsequently distorting the city’s appearance. For this reason, and also for environmental reasons, smart cities involve the use of modern technologies for intelligent waste management. Smart bins in urban areas are equipped with sensors that monitor the condition of the bins in real-time and trigger alarms that wirelessly communicate central data to the waste stations, which then send vehicles to collect the waste from the selected bins, in order to guarantee the maximization of the waste collected while minimizing transport costs. In our proposed framework, the bins are compartmentalized into n compartments, each compartment is specific to a single type and equipped with sensors, similarly, the fleet of vehicles is heterogeneous and the vehicles have separate compartments. A new mathematical model MIP is proposed to deal with this problem with the objective of minimizing the costs, which are transport costs and penalty costs that would contribute to an optimal decision on the early collection of partially filled bins.