Application of Mathematical Optimization to Waste Allocation among Waste-to-Energy Plants for Wide-Area Disposal

Abstract

In recent years, natural disasters have become more severe and frequent. To prepare for this threat, the government of Japan has been asking local governments to establish measures for disaster waste in advance. Even in case of a disaster, local governments have to keep the disposal of daily waste and dispose of the large amount of disaster waste properly, smoothly and quickly. Therefore, local governments are required to build a system that cooperates widely. In order to realize wide-area disposal, it is necessary to plan the allocation of disaster waste to each plant, as well as to review the operation plan of each plant due to the additional disaster waste. For this, for example, a support center could be established, where operation data on each plant is aggregated, and these plans are formulated. However, it is very heavy task to manually create plans for efficiently disposing of disaster waste under the operational constraints of each plant. This paper introduces an application example of an efficient automatic planning method that assumes that disaster waste is received in a region and allocated among four cooperative facilities.