A Metaheuristic Approach to the Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands and Travel Times

This paper presents the methodology for solving the municipal waste collection problem in urban areas. This problem is treated as a vehicle routing problem where the demand in nodes and travel times between all pairs of nodes in a transport network are taken as stochastic quantities, known in the literature as the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (VRPSD). This problem is formulated as a chance-constrained programming model with normal distribution. Heuristic and metaheuristic methods, as well as their combinations, are applied to efficiently solve this model. Finally, the paper presents a comparative analysis of the obtained results with real data.