A case study on period vehicle routing in a refuse collection system

Period vehicle routing, a multi-period extension of the capacitated vehicle routing problem, is the problem of determining a service combination of each customer as well as the vehicle routes in each period of the planning horizon while satisfying the restrictions on the vehicle capacity and the travel distance (time). The problem can typically be found in refuse collection systems in which end-of-life products or wastes are collected and moved to the facilities where further treatment is taken care of. In this study, we report a case study on the problem for the objective of minimising the fleet size, i.e. the maximum number of vehicles simultaneously required over the planning horizon. To solve the problem, we adopt the two-stage heuristic in which an initial solution is obtained by assigning a service combination to each collection point, and then it is improved by changing the service combination assigned to each collection point. Computational experiment was done on the case data and significant improvement over the conventional method is reported.