Decision Support for Capacitated Arc Routing for Providing Municipal Waste and Recycling Services

This paper describes the design, development and initial evaluation of a decision support system (DSS) for capacitated arc routing. The research was motivated from a collaboration project with The City of Calgary business unit for Waste & Recycling Services (WRS). Their services cover residential waste collection for 306,000 residential homes. Intelligent decision support was needed to address the increasing business complexity and the need for higher efficiency and transparency of decision-making processes. The proposed routing is incorporating seasonal trends of waste creation. The seasonal changes are between 10.000 (low) to 25000 (peak) tons per month for the whole city. Different arc routings apply for different amounts of waste. A prototype DSS was developed with several components including one for prediction of waste amounts and one for arc routing of trucks. The paper describes the methodology, the existing DSS-WRS prototype implementation and preliminary results from its case study implementation.