Solving the Periodic Edge Routing Problem in the Municipal Waste Collection

Abstract

In many municipal waste collection systems, it is necessary to extend the planning horizon to more than one working day. This can happen, for example, in the collection of some recyclable articles. In this case, some of the streets must be served every day but others need only once every two days service. In this paper, we focus on planning the routing of the collection vehicles while extending the planning horizon to two working days. We propose a simple, but effective, heuristic approach and we carry out extensive computational experiments to evaluate its performance. We also apply our method to solve a real-case application related to the collection of recyclable wastes in a small Italian city.