Title: Heuristic approaches for waste containers location problem and waste collection routes optimisation in an urban area

Authors: Othmane El Yaakoubi; Meryam Benabdouallah; Chakib Bojji

Addresses: Center of Sciences and Engineer Technologies, Normal Superior School of Technical Education/Ecole Normale, Supérieure de l'Enseignement Technique (ENSET), Mohammed V University, Rabat, 10100, Morocco ' Mathematics Department, Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Technologies de l'Ingénieur (ESSTI), Rabat, 10090, Morocco ' Center of Sciences and Engineer Technologies, Normal Superior School of Technical Education/Ecole Normale, Supérieure de l'Enseignement Technique (ENSET), Mohammed V University, Rabat, 10100, Morocco

Abstract: A generalisation of the traditional waste collection vehicle routing problem with time windows (WCVRPTW) is studied in this paper. In case of the number of waste containers is limited, some collection sites requires to be visited for multiple times per day instead of one. Therefore a waste containers management study is required to economise the collection cost. We propose an approach that combines the two problems: containers location (WCLP) and the vehicle routes optimisation. Two algorithms to solve this problem are used. The first is memetic algorithm (MA) to solve the WCLP in order to get the best containers distribution. The second is an iterated local search (ILS) algorithm to solve WCVRPTW with homogenous vehicles and taking into consideration WCLP as constraint. These algorithms are evaluated on classical vehicle routing problem (VRP) instances. The experiment results prove the impact of this combining on collection routes cost in the cited case.

Keywords: WCVRPTW; waste containers management; WCLP; memetic algorithm; iterated local search; ILS; vehicle routing problem; VRP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEWM.2018.093436

International Journal of Environment and Waste Management, 2018 Vol.21 No.4, pp.269 - 286

Accepted: 30 Apr 2018
Published online: 25 Jul 2018 *

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