An Effective Solid Waste Management Collection System Utilizing Smartphone Sensors

Solid Waste Management is one of the essential public service undertaken by any city administration. As population in major cities of the world are expanding, it is becoming a complex task to manage the waste operations with limited resources and improve the livability index of the citizens. To address this issue, many smart cities in India piloted the use of smart bins as a measure to get alerts on the waste generation and efficiently plan activities of waste collection. However, such technology although shown to be efficient in operations has its disadvantage in increased cost to maintenance to ensure smart bin sensors are functional, prone to theft and damage. In addition, smart bins have limitation in competence of garbage collection in developing countries. In this paper we define an alternate and efficient method to estimate waste being collected by vehicles using weight estimation technology utilizing smartphone sensor data such as GPS and tri-axis accelerometer. Further, waste collection estimates are utilized as agents based on which stoppages for door-to-door collection are determined and profiled. A system is developed, which generates actionable operational alerts and reports to manage waste operations. Considering the alerts generated, an optimization function is developed to recommend measures to improve efficiency. We further conducted a pilot with Varanasi Smart City to evaluate our technology. We observed promising results in terms of improved collection over time and reduction of overall distance to be travelled for waste collection, through recommendations, thus making a commitment to achieve a sustainable city.