Vehicle Routing in a Refuse Collection System: a Case Study

Refuse collection is an activity rendering used products or wastes and moving them to some points where further treatment is taken care of. This paper addresses the vehicle routing problem occurred in a refuse collection area, Seoul, South Korea. The vehicle routing problem considered in this case study is the problem of determining the vehicle routes that satisfy the demand at each collection point while satisfying the vehicle capacity for the objective of minimizing the total distance traveled. Unlike the ordinary deterministic version of the problem, we consider the problem with stochastic demand at each collection point. Therefore, the vehicle capacity may be violated at random. Two types of solution algorithms, deterministic and stochastic ones, are suggested. To show the performances of the algorithms, simulation experiments were done on the case data, and the results show that our algorithms significantly improve the conventional method.