Routing Optimization for Waste Management - Essay Example

Running Head: Routing Optimization for Waste Management Routing Optimization for Waste Management Introduction Waste management is a garbage collection company which is motivated by partnering with the Institute of Information Technology to provide better solutions and services to their customers. They have millions of customers to serve which gives them a reason to get motivated. The customers range from businesses, commercial collections, residential collections and industrial collections (Waste Management, Inc. 2003).The high number of customers available give them a good reason for motivation since they will are able to maximize their profits through them. Most of the customers are satisfied by their services, hence makes them confident that they are going to gain more customers by improving their services and even being able to retain their customers. In North America, the company has been able to retain a good reputation for the best garbage collection company. The company is situated in Houston, Texas having 293 disposal sites, 364 transfer stations, 16 waste energy plants and 435 collection operations. The customer numbers are overwhelming totaling to 22 million residential and commercial customers. The number of customers increases giving them a high motivation to move forward as a fast growing company. The waste management faced problems of vehicle routing since the vehicles to collect the garbage are only allowed to ride and stop at the right side of the road. They also faced a big challenge of maintaining all the regions with only the limited resources as compared to the overwhelming customers. There are several challenges in management and dispatching due to decentralization. Waste management collection provides services to forty eight states. The company provides very detailed waste programs for large national companies creating customized programs, giving them trained personnel to help them in management of environmental and specialized needs. The competition for garbage collection is very high so many companies compete for the customers based on the price they offer to their clients. The company has the following objectives, to maximize on the visual attractiveness which will enable the company to gain more customers because of the good image portrayed. Minimize of the number of vehicles so that the company cannot spend more and more resources servicing lots of vehicles. Minimizing the travel time ensures more resources like the money used to fuel all those trips is saved. Balancing work load among the vehicles to ensure more efficient work is also another objective of the company. Model The above stated problem is to be solved through a mathematical model which tries to cab the problem of the time take by a vehicle to travel while collecting the garbage. The other problem the mathematical programming model is going to address is balancing the work load, enhancing visual attractiveness by maximizing it and also minimizing the number of vehicles having to be on the move for garbage collection. The model also considers single-vehicle capacity alone by assuming that the number of vehicle is given and consideration of a single objective function. The residential and commercial collection challenges are classified as variations of vehicle routing problems with time windows but with additional constraints (Waste Management, Inc. 2003). By adopting the notation and vehicle routing problem with time windows, they are changed to incorporate the drivers’ lunch break and the disposal operations. The vehicle routing problems with time windows, is clearly represented in the network for the mathematical model by the variable. The landfills are represented by nodes which are represented by the variables to be used in the applets. Deports and the drivers lunch break are also represented with different variables to show clarity. Through the use of variables we ensure that there is efficiency. In order to model, landfills are duplicated such that a vehicle visits them at most once in a route. The maximum disposal trips for a vehicle can determine the number of duplications in a day. Deports time window has a unique meaning for the earliest possible departure. Ever node has a service time and demand each given different variables. min ∑ ∑ ti,jxi,j,k k€k(i, j)€A subject to ∑xi,j,k=1 Ɐi€1,2…,N k€k(i, j)€A The following equation imposes the rule that each regular stop should be served by exactly one vehicle. ∑nx,o,j,k=1 Ɐk€k, j=1 The above equation ensures that each route starts from the depot. Di,k Read More