Abstract
Japan suffered enormous damage from the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Normally, in areas not equipped with sewage systems, human wastes from homes and businesses are transported by vacuum trucks to treatment facilities for proper disposal. When a disaster shuts down those facilities, however, the wastes can no longer be transported to the usual places and treatment at other facilities has to be requested. In this way a disaster can greatly alter the normal arrangements for transporting the wastes. From the standpoint of public sanitation, steps must be taken to prevent the wastes from being left in an unsanitary state. It is therefore important to provide a system for properly transporting human wastes to treatment facilities.
The purpose of this research is to help make Japan more robust and contribute toward disaster readiness and disaster mitigation, in preparation for a megaquake expected to occur along the Nankai Trough. This paper focuses on a wide-area human waste treatment system and its optimization. Mathematical planning was used to create optimized models for facility provision planning and transport planning, respectively. When optimizing simulations were performed, the proposed models made it possible to determine the base facilities where temporary pits should be located and their capacities. The study also succeeded in quantitatively indicating the transport cost savings when waste transfer stations are introduced.
