Improved route planning and scheduling of waste collection and transport

The collection of waste is a highly visible and important municipal service that involves large expenditures. Waste collection problems are, however, one of the most difficult operational problems to solve. This paper describes the optimization of vehicle routes and schedules for collecting municipal solid waste in Eastern Finland. The solutions are generated by a recently developed guided variable neighborhood thresholding metaheuristic that is adapted to solve real-life waste collection problems. Several implementation approaches to speed up the method and cut down the memory usage are discussed. A case study on the waste collection in two regions of Eastern Finland demonstrates that significant cost reductions can be obtained compared with the current practice. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.