On Solving the Hazardous Health-Care Waste Transportation Problem: a Real Case Study

Health-care wastes are special category of wastes generated by medical facilities and containing infectious materials. According to the Word Health Organization, more than 15% of the medical wastes are very dangerous and represent a serious threat for humans and for the environment. In this paper, we investigate a major issue related to the collection and transportation of these wastes from a set of dispersed hospitals to the disposal center. The problem is modeled as a Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) with the aim of minimizing the total travel distance. To solve this problem, three solutions approaches are considered: a hybrid evolutionary algorithm, a Genetic Algorithm, and a Variable Neighborhood Search. These approaches are tested over real data sets. The experimental results show that the hybrid approach is very competitive in comparison with the other methods.

[1]  Dorra Baati,et al.  Designing a new infectious healthcare-waste management system in sfax governorate, tunisia , 2014, 2014 International Conference on Advanced Logistics and Transport (ICALT).

[2]  H. Chabchoub,et al.  Routing system for infectious healthcare-waste transportation in tunisia: a case study , 2014 .

[3]  Pamela C. Nolz,et al.  A Bi-Objective Inventory Routing Problem for Sustainable Waste Management Under Uncertainty , 2014 .

[4]  Beatrice M. Ombuki-Berman,et al.  Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows , 2006, Applied Intelligence.

[5]  Nataša Petrović,et al.  The fault tree analysis of infectious medical waste management , 2016 .

[6]  Li-Hsing Shih,et al.  A Routing and Scheduling System for Infectious Waste Collection , 2001 .

[7]  E Gidarakos,et al.  Hospital waste management and toxicity evaluation: a case study. , 2007, Waste management.

[8]  Pierre Hansen,et al.  Variable Neighborhood Search , 2018, Handbook of Heuristics.

[9]  Aylin Zeren Alagöz,et al.  Improvement and modification of the routing system for the health-care waste collection and transportation in Istanbul. , 2008, Waste management.

[10]  Yong-Chul Jang,et al.  Medical waste management in Korea. , 2006, Journal of environmental management.

[11]  Hussam Alshraideh,et al.  Stochastic modeling and optimization of medical waste collection in Northern Jordan , 2017 .

[12]  Dorothea Heiss-Czedik,et al.  An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. , 1997, Artificial Life.

[13]  Vikas Thakur,et al.  Healthcare waste management research: A structured analysis and review (2005–2014) , 2015, Waste management & research : the journal of the International Solid Wastes and Public Cleansing Association, ISWA.

[14]  Daniele Vigo,et al.  Operations research in solid waste management: A survey of strategic and tactical issues , 2014, Comput. Oper. Res..

[15]  Nubia Velasco,et al.  Variable neighborhood search to solve the vehicle routing problem for hazardous materials transportation. , 2017, Journal of hazardous materials.

[16]  Michel Gendreau,et al.  A Tabu Search Heuristic for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Soft Time Windows , 1997, Transp. Sci..

[17]  Shengxiang Yang,et al.  Evolutionary dynamic optimization: A survey of the state of the art , 2012, Swarm Evol. Comput..

[18]  Margarida Ribau Teixeira,et al.  Healthcare waste management practices and risk perceptions: findings from hospitals in the Algarve region, Portugal. , 2010, Waste management.

[19]  Padmabati Chand,et al.  A Multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem using Dominant Rank Method , 2013 .

[20]  Bassem Jarboui,et al.  A variable neighborhood search algorithm for the capacitated vehicle routing problem , 2017, Electron. Notes Discret. Math..

[21]  Juan José Salazar González,et al.  The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem: Stronger bounds in pseudo-polynomial time , 2019, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[22]  Shengji Luan,et al.  Application of multi-criteria-decision approach for the analysis of medical waste management systems in Myanmar , 2019, Journal of Cleaner Production.

[23]  Saoussen Krichen,et al.  A New Evolutionary Method to Deal with the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Technology Management, Operations and Decisions (ICTMOD).