Simulation-based evolution of municipal glass-waste collection strategies utilizing electric trucks

In urban areas freight transport imposes many social and environmental issues. Solid waste collection accounts for a considerable amount of freight transportation in municipal areas. We propose a simulation-based approach to evaluate different scenarios where electric trucks replace conventional trucks for the collection of municipal glass-waste. Under special consideration of the characteristics of electric trucks, the simulation of real-time fill level information is used and coupled with an optimization component to evolve adapted waste collection strategies. We illustrate our approach on two test-scenarios based on real-world data. We use the simulation model to evaluate several scenarios in terms of costs and environmental impact and the optimization environment to generate collection strategies that minimize those performance figures while maintaining a given service quality.