Solid Waste Management using Equal Sized Clustering and Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The production of solid waste is increasing every year. With this increasing waste production comes a challenge to managing it. The initial step in managing this waste is an efficient collection plan to collect the waste from its locations and transport it to the treatment plant/dumping area. This paper considers a solid waste management problem in which solid waste from a particular area or city is collected using vehicles responsible for collecting and transporting the waste from bins to the treatment plant. The problem aims to optimize the solution by minimizing vehicle expenditure during travel. It is achieved by finding the best possible route and minimizing the vehicle's distance traveled. This paper proposes a solution with a two-tier approach based on first clustering using an equal-sized clustering using a modified k-means algorithm and then reducing the path to a low-cost path using simulated annealing.