Scheduling Vehicles for Refuse Collection

Abstract

This paper reports an application of vehicle-scheduling algorithms in the collection of refuse. The problem differs from classical vehicle-scheduling applications in that the tipping site and the place where the vehicles are garaged are at different locations. Several algorithms are tested in terms of total route mileage and computational loads. An improvement over the manual method of the order of 8% was obtained using average figures for refuse volume over a period of time. The results appear to be more useful in obtaining a good solution when the main problem parameters change rather than in the day-to-day routeing of vehicles.

Keywords:

• dispatching
• scheduling
• travelling
• vehicles