Assessing dynamic models for high priority waste collection in smart cities

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWaste Management (WM) represents an important part of Smart Cities (SCs) with significant impact on modern societies. WM involves a set of processes ranging from waste collection to the recycling of the collected materials. The proliferation of sensors and actuators enable the new era of Internet of Things (IoT) that can be adopted in SCs and help in WM. Novel approaches that involve dynamic routing models combined with the IoT capabilities could provide solutions that outperform existing models. In this paper, we focus on a SC where a number of collection bins are located in different areas with sensors attached to them. We study a dynamic waste collection architecture, which is based on data retrieved by sensors. We pay special attention to the possibility of immediate WM service in high priority areas, e.g., schools or hospitals where, possibly, the presence of dangerous waste or the negative effects on human quality of living impose the need for immediate collection. This is very crucial when we focus on sensitive groups of citizens like pupils, elderly or people living close to areas where dangerous waste is rejected. We propose novel algorithms aiming at providing efficient and scalable solutions to the dynamic waste collection problem through the management of the trade-off between the immediate collection and its cost. We describe how the proposed system effectively responds to the demand as realized by sensor observations and alerts originated in high priority areas. Our aim is to minimize the time required for serving high priority areas while keeping the average expected performance at high level. Comprehensive simulations on top of the data retrieved by a SC validate the proposed algorithms on both quantitative and qualitative criteria which are adopted to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We claim that, local authorities could choose the model that best matches their needs and resources of each city.

Smart City Platform Development for an Automated Waste Collection System

“…Smart collection bins with ultrasonic sensors attached to them in order to measure the empty space can be located in different areas of the city. A sensor gateway based on long range wide area network (LoRaWAN) protocol and cloud platforms for data collection, analysis and visualization should be used [13,14].…”

ABS-SmartPriority: An Agent-Based Simulator of Strategies for Managing Self-Reported Priorities in Smart Cities

“…On the whole, ABS-SmartPriority has allowed us to properly simulate different self-reported priority policies that presented statistically significant differences in the outcomes. The main contribution of the current work over works about priority mechanisms like the ones about waste collection [7] and hospital management [8] is that the proposed approach explores the management of self-report priorities by people with heterogeneous criteria and agendas in a nearly fair way. In addition, the current work improves the testbeds about smart priorities such as the one of Sanchez et al [10] by incorporating the concept of self-reported priorities for increasing the performance of the use of smart city resources and services.…”

“…For example, Anagnostopoulos et al [7] used priorities for determining how to collect waste in smart cities, prioritizing the areas that can have potentially risky waste such as hospital areas. Another example is the way patients are commonly attended every day in a hospital.…”

Smart Cities: A Case Study in Waste Monitoring and Management

“…Test stage in Market Top-k [9] Robust [7] Tracking [33] Smart Waste [27] Priority [8] Big belly [40] Enevo [3] SmartBin SENSdumpster [5] based business models (pay-as-you-throw / PAYT) for waste management. In [28], authors present an IoT based smart garbage system, that utilizes PAYT model for food waste management.…”