Waste collection in Southern Italy: solution of a real-life arc routing problem

We conducted a study on solid waste collection for the Health Department of the Municipality of Castrovillari, a town located in Southern Italy. The main difficulties we had to tackle depended on a number of constraints imposed by road network features, traffic congestion and equipment. As these aspects are quite common in Europe, we expected to find some related methodology (or, at least, some case studies) in the literature. Surprisingly, most issues of our problem were not addressed by any existing paper. We therefore carried out a research project whose outcome was a computerized system which allowed one to avoid overtime and to accomplish a reduction of about 8% in total cost. We estimate that, if applied by other Italian municipalities, this kind of analysis could save hundreds of millions of Euro every year.