Ant Algorithms for Urban Waste Collection Routing

Problems arising on Urban Waste Management are broad and varied. This paper is focused on designing collection routes for urban wastes, a problem existing in most European waste collection systems. The relationship between the real world problem and the Arc Routing literature is established, and the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem is extended to comply with traffic rules. Afterwards, an Ant Algorithm is designed to solve this problem, and its efficiency is tested using the instance sets from the CARP literature and a set of real life instances from the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. Finally, the integration between the proposed algorithms and a Decision Support System for Urban Waste Management is shown.