Municipal Solid Waste Collection and Management Problems: A Literature Review

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the available literature on solid waste management problems, with a particular focus on vehicle routing problems. The available papers are classified into different categories with the purpose of providing the reader with a guide that facilitates his or her search for papers in his or her field of interest. For each category, a table is presented that gives a summary of how each paper scores from that perspective. Additional explanation is presented about the characteristics of each category using some key references. Finally, this paper discovers unexplored areas of research and identifies trends in the literature.

A periodic location routing problem for collaborative recycling

“…Beltrami and Bodin (1974) models the PVRP for waste collection for residential and commercial customers, routing of barges to collect large containers of garbage, and arc routing for street sweeping. Beliën et al (2014) surveys the literature on routing for municipal waste collection, and categorize papers based on the type of collection: (1) curbside collection, (2) collection at a consolidation site such as a neighborhood recycling center, and (3) collection of large quantities of goods from industrial customers. Our application has some resemblance with categories (1) and (2).…”

Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem: Literature Review

“…In essence, waste collection could be treated as a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) [39]. The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) introduced for the first time by Dantzig and Ramserl in 1959 [40] focused on forward deliveries (from a depot to "n" customers).…”

“…The complexity of this problem depends on different characteristics such as different types of vehicles, number of disposal facilities (single or multiple), various types of constraints, etc. [39]; such as time interval or vehicle capacity referred to customer services, revealing the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), respectively. In the last fifty years numerous real-world problems have demanded widespread formulation that resulted in the VRP with backhauls, stochastic VRP, multiple depot VRP, split delivery VRP, periodic VRP, VRP with pickup and delivering, and many others [41].…”

“…This means that a solution has to be sought after servicing a crowd of customers with a set of vehicles. In general, different methods can be applied to solve the vehicle routing problem: namely, classical heuristics and meta-heuristics [39].…”

“…Every time the heuristic chooses the closest node to the present node as the next customer to visit. It is a way to find close-to-optimal solutions [39].…”