Numerical Evaluation of Garbage Collection Services by Mathematical Programming and Geographic Data

Abstract

The vehicle routing problems for services of collecting home garbages are hard to optimize due to not only their combinatorial scale but also their intrinsic constraints. This problem is becoming a serious issue from viewpoints of cost savings of the public service of local governments. We try to develop the optimization method incorporating realistic functions in order to evaluate and compare various systems of garbage collection services. In this optimization method, the problem is formulated as a set covering problem which enables to decompose the problem into routes generation and routes selection. The routes can be generated by adopting dynamic programming techniques on the road network of the city. On the other hand, the optimal set of routes is selected by solving the set covering problem of the candidate route collection. Through some numerical evaluation for the realistic services of garbage collection, the potential for application of our method is examined.