A LOCATIONAL MODEL FOR THE SITE SELECTION OF SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT FACILITIES WITH TRAFFIC CONGESTION CONSTRAINTS

Abstract

The management of an integrated solid waste system has significantly changed with increasing environmental concerns. Conventional location/allocation models for solid waste management usually incorporate mass balance, capacity limitation, operating, and financial constraints. But the siting of important facilities, such as landfills, incinerators, and transfer stations, in a growing metropolitan region still encounters an explicit limitation: a traffic congestion constraint. The transfer station is the most critical one due to the various loading of different types of incoming and outgoing trucks during the peak hours in the metropolitan region. A mixed integer programming model with the framework of dynamic optimization still can be used efficiently for site selection over time once the traffic congestion constraint is included. The practical implementation of such a model is assessed by a case study of the Kaohsiung solid waste management system in Taiwan. It shows that the incorporation of the traffic congestion constraint does influence the optimal flow pattern in the soldity waste management network.

KEY WORDS:

• Solid waste management
• optimization
• cost/benefit analysis