IoT-Enabled Intelligent Garbage Management System for Smart City: A Fairness Perspective

Waste management has been identified as a critical problem underpinning the vision of sustainable cities. Despite existing efforts to tackle this challenge, traditional approaches still undermine resource allocation and utilization for the task. Most methods have overlooked the fairness problem found in the garbage-collection transportation units, producing noticeable varying active time differences among the participating units. The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) to waste management has recently been an emerging trend, which offers coordinated garbage collection benefiting from IoT networks. This work investigates utilization of LoRa technology for such a purpose and argues the importance of fairness perspective in actuating the truck agents for collecting the wastes in a given region. Through enabling reliable waste data exchange by a proper design and specification of the LoRa network, we can then cast the collection issue as a capacitated vehicle routing problem with a well-formulated objective function. To improve the fairness in the waste management, we propose an objective function that incorporates both the total distance covered by all the trucks and overall distance dispersion from individual trucks. Numerical simulation demonstrates the superiority and consistency of the fairness-based optimum solution in both minimizing the total distance and achieving the fairness.