Rollon-Rolloff Vehicle Routing Problem in the Waste Collection Industry

We introduce the rollon-rolloff vehicle routing problem which is a variant of vehicle routing problem. In this problem, large containers are at demand locations such as construction sites. Tractors move a container at a time between demand locations and disposal facilities and container storage yards. The objective is to minimize the number of required tractors and the total travel time of tractors. The problem considered in this paper has complicated constraints including multiple disposal facilities, multiple continaer storage yard locations, seven service types of demands, time windows of each location, available container size, container type and lunch break for the tractor drivers. We propose a heuristic approach consisting of several algorithms for the problem and conduct experiments using benchmark data sets of two types. The benchmark data are derived from real world waste collection problems and generated by the authors. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated by computational experiments.