Fuel Efficiency of Garbage Truck Navigation

We investigate achieving fuel efficiency in an economy of garbage truck collections. Fuel efficiency relates to minimising both fuel consumption and travel time. Minimising just the fuel consumption is often done by garbage collection companies and minimising just the travel time is the most popular Google Maps heuristic. We combine these two criteria for online fuel-efficiency optimisation. We prove that this takes exponential time in some edge cases but polynomial time in many practical cases. We also design three natural heuristics, approximating fuel efficiency in the edge cases, that minimise fuel consumption, travel time, and both, respectively. We evaluate the performance of these heuristics in preliminary simulations. Finally, we discuss a plan for the possible deployment of these methods.