Dynamic optimization for the planning of a waste management system involving multiple cities Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2017 Elsevier Ltd Consumption habits and population growth have drastically increased the waste production around the world. However, several developing countries do not have an adequate waste management system. This way, a mathematical model for the optimal planning of a waste management system could be a useful tool to make decisions about the design of a waste processing system to promote sustainable public polices and cooperation among multiple cities. Therefore, this work proposes a mathematical formulation for the optimal planning of a waste management system considering waste from different neighboring cities divided in several sites, as well as the dependence over time for the variables and parameters through a set of differential equations for properly capturing the associated dynamic behavior. Results show that given the data of potential locations for sites, landfills, processing plants and consumers, as well as prices of useful products, availability of waste, upper and lower limits, unitary costs for the different activities carried out in the waste management system and initial values for inventory and order levels, it is possible to obtain the optimal selection and location of the entities of the waste management system as well as the plant capacities and material flows to be transported, processed, stored and sold. The proposed mathematical formulation is general and it can be applied to any waste type, involving different landfills, sites, cities, processing routes and processing plants. Although the CPU time increases for considering the dynamic behavior, it is proved that the associated costs decrease significantly.

publication date

  • November 1, 2017