Supporting multi-depot and stochastic waste collection management in clustered urban areas via simulation–optimization

Waste collection is one of the most critical logistics activities in modern cities with considerable impact on the quality of life, urban environment, city attractiveness, traffic flows and municipal budgets. Despite the problem’s relevance, most existing work addresses simplified versions where container loads are considered to be known in advance and served by a single vehicle depot. Waste levels, however, cannot be estimated with complete certainty as they are only revealed at collection. Furthermore, in large cities and clustered urban areas, multiple depots from which collection routes originate are common, although cooperation among vehicles from different depots is rarely considered. This paper analyses a rich version of the waste collection problem with multiple depots and stochastic demands by proposing a hybrid algorithm combining metaheuristics with simulation. Our ‘simheuristic’ approach allows for studying the effects of cooperation among different depots, thus quantifying the potential savings this cooperation could provide to city governments and waste collection companies.