Optimizing smart waste collection through container selection

Optimizing smart waste collection through container selection

van Zeijl, Jelmer (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Atasoy, B. (mentor)
Brandt, Jelmer (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Marine Technology | Transport Engineering and Logistics

2021-02-17

A significant growth of the world’s population together with fast growing urbanization is causing challenges for cities in the future. One of these challenges is how to deal with waste production and therefore the waste collection in such areas. Smart waste collection is a promising solution since it optimizes an already excising infra structure including vehicles and since the collection and transportation of the produced waste accounts for roughly 70% of the waste management costs. Smart waste collection is a routing problem and can be categorized both as a vehicle routing problem (VRP) or as an inventory routing problem (IRP) depending on which container selection method is used. Smart waste collection uses sensors to measure and communicate the fill levels of the waste containers. This data can be used to optimize the process of waste collection and optimize the chosen KPIs. When all fill levels are known, routes can be optimized and containers can be collected at exactly the right time. This article will use real data obtained from the containers collected by OMRIN with the help of AMCS and their software. Container selection methods can be categorized as threshold based, attractiveness based or must-go may-go based. Containers can be selected for collection, roughly based on three methods. The interesting thing is that these three methods have not yet been compared to each other. Therefore the main goal of this research is to compare the three aforementioned methods based on real data and investigate certain tuning parameters to optimize each model based on the chosen KPIs. The models are first individually optimized by changing their tuning parameters and keeping the overflow in an acceptable range of the baseline, calculated based on real data. Overall a strong negative correlation is found between the total traveled time and the amount of overflows. Furthermore a warm-up period of three days is used, meaning the first three days of a test instance will be removed in order to capture only the steady state of the models. The individual optimization shows the best solutions for a 1% threshold buffer for the threshold model, a three-day horizon with 110% upper limit for the attractiveness model and a three-day horizon with an threshold buffer of 7% and a 110% upper limit for the must-go may-go model. When compared the attractiveness model shows to have the smallest total travel time. However, its computational time exceeds the actual total travel time. The must-go may-go model shows a slightly higher total travel time, but has a significant lower computational time. Therefore making it more suitable for real world application. This research as well shows that the two-day horizon instances of both the attractiveness model and the must-go may-go model barely improve the solution of the one-day horizon. Finally a true forecasting model was used to see what potential lies with designing a detailed forecasting model, which shows to be in the same order of improvement as was obtained by tuning parameters of each model.

Smart waste collection

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a791a7d4-6c76-4886-86a9-aee22356e733

Student theses

master thesis

© 2021 Jelmer van Zeijl