Capacitated location of collection sites in an urban waste management system

Urban waste management is becoming an increasingly complex task, absorbing a huge amount ofresources, and having a major environmental impact. The design of a waste management system consistsin various activities, and one of these is related to the location of waste collection sites. In this paper, wepropose an integer programming model that helps decision makers in choosing the sites where to locatethe unsorted waste collection bins in a residential town, as well as the capacities of the bins to be locatedat each collection site. This model helps in assessing tactical decisions through constraints that force eachcollection area to be capacitated enough to fit the expected waste to be directed to that area, while takinginto account Quality of Service constraints from the citizens’ point of view. Moreover, we propose aneffective constructive heuristic approach whose aim is to provide a good solution quality in an extremelyreduced computational time. Computational results on data related to the city of Nardò, in the south ofItaly, show that both exact and heuristic approaches provide consistently better solutions than that currentlyimplemented, resulting in a lower number of activated collection sites, and a lower number of binsto be used.