The multi-compartment vehicle routing problem in the collection of recyclable municipal solid waste

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Rodrigo Ferreira da Rocha e
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/13537
• topic: Waste management; Transportation management; Vehicle routing; Multi-compartment vehicles; Gestão de resíduos; Planeamento dos transportes; Reciclagem de resíduos; Viabilidade económica

Waste production is an inevitable by-product of today’s society activities, and its collection is an essential public service. With an increase in population density and consequently in the production of waste, a growing concern on environmental sustainability came along. European and national legislation imposes material recycling, and in order to ensure the sector’s economic viability and offset the strong market regulation, companies seek to find more efficient alternatives. In a waste collection system, transportation costs represent approximately 70% of the total cost, meaning that routing decisions have a great impact on the financial sustainability of the companies in this sector. This mind-set led to the study of the operation of Valorsul, the company responsible for the collection of recyclable municipal solid waste in the western region of Portugal. This work intends to assess the impact on the distance travelled by using multi-compartment vehicles, collecting Paper and/Cardboard and Plastic and/Metal simultaneously, in comparison to the use of single compartmented vehicles, where only one material is collected at a time. To do so, a hybrid model was developed that firstly selects which collection points from the existing network are worth visit with multi-compartment vehicles, and then implements a heuristic to cluster and route those collection points. The proposed model was applied to a specific region of Valorsul system, and the results obtained suggest that the use of vehicles with multi-comparts is more beneficial than the use of vehicles with only one, reducing the total distance travelled.