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Truck schedule recovery for solid waste collection in Porto Alegre, Brazil

Abstract:

This paper considers a truck schedule recovery problem in the context of solid waste collection in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. When a truck on a scheduled trip breaks down, a backup truck needs to be selected to serve the cargo on that trip and other trucks might be rescheduled in order to gain the minimum operating and delay costs. The problem consists of designing, in the case of a severe disruption in a trip, new schedules taking into account the existing trucks in the system and a set of unfinished and not initiated collection trips, on which the trucks collect the solid waste in fixed routes and empty the loads in one of the several operational recycling facilities. The main objective is to minimize the total distances traveled and delay costs, as well as to obtain balanced assignments of truck unloads into the recycling facilities, due to the social benefits of the solid waste program. We modeled the problem as a mixed-integer linear problem and used CPLEX to solve it. Finally, computational experiments are conducted on real-world data. The results show that our approach successfully reduces the distances traveled and delays, simultaneously balancing the number of trucks unloading at each recycling facility, in comparison with the current manual strategy. © 2008 International Federation of Operational Research Societies.