ABSTRACT
Urban waste collection is a highly visible municipal service which consists of large expenditures and difficult operational issues. In addition, it is very costly to operate in terms of investment costs (i.e. vehicles fleet) and operational costs (i.e. fuel and maintenances), so generating small improvements in this field can lead to large savings in municipal expenditures. Among these problems raised in the process of decisions making by managers and associated policymakers, one can respect the determination of the optimal weekly policies of waste collection. In this paper, a periodic capacitated arc routing problem (PCARP) is described by designing a smart model of considering mobile disposal sites. The aim is to minimize total cost and present a financial planning for related organizations such as municipalities. In other words, the aim is to determine the optimal routes for all of the required edges (streets or alleys with positive demands) per week, number and locations of the mobile disposal sites and the number of the used vehicles. In order to solve the problem, two optimization algorithms of simulated annealing are proposed, which have different cooling schedules. Then, CPLEX solver is used in order to evaluate the performance of these algorithms in small-sized problems. The experimental results show that the algorithms have appropriate performance in a reasonable computational time.
