A simulated annealing algorithm for solving a routing problem in the context of municipal solid waste collection

FERMANI, MATÍAS; ROSSIT, DIEGO GABRIEL; TONCOVICH, ADRIÁN ANDRÉS

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Springer

Año: 2021 vol. 1408 p. 63 - 76

The management of the collection of Municipal Solid Waste is a complex task for local governments since it consumes a large portion of their budgets. Thus, the use of computer-aided tools to support decision-making can contribute to improve the efficiency of the system and reduce the associated costs. In the present work, a simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to address the problem of designing the routes of waste collection vehicles. The proposed algorithm is compared against two other metaheuristic algorithms: a LargeNeighborhood Search (LNS) algorithm from the literature and a standard genetic algorithm. The evaluation is carried out on real instances of the city of Bahía Blanca and on benchmarks from the literature. The proposed algorithm was able to solve all the instances, having an average performance similar to the LNS, while the standard genetic algorithm showed less promising results.