Integrated Vehicle Routing and Crew Scheduling in Waste Management (Part I)

Abstract

Planning Waste Management involves the two major resources collection-vehicles and crews. The overall goal of our project with two waste management companies is an integrative approach for planning the routes and the crews of the vehicles.

In the first phase of our three-phase approach we generate daily crew tasks which contain routes operated by a single crew at a particular day within a given disposal horizon considering various practical requirements. The goal is to minimize the number of crews/vehicles required for the entire disposal process. Given the minimal number of crews, in phase 2 we re-optimize the daily crew tasks to increase the robustness of the routes.

In the third phase we assign employees to the generated daily crew tasks for all working days over the year such that the constraints concerning crew scheduling are satisfied and the benefits for the employees and the company are maximal.

For all phases we present solution methods yielding first promising results for a real-world data set.