A tool to improve the efficiency of waste collection: development and application to a case study

Resumen

In this work, we present a real case study of optimization of waste collection routes. In our particular case, the collection area is La Rioja (a region of Spain with an area of 5.045 km^2 and a population of ca. 300.000 people). The starting point of our study was some unstructured data that The Circular Lab (https://www.thecircularlab.com/en/) handed us from the routes that were being used, as well as some particular instances of these routes that had been completed by trucks in their daily routine. From that particular routes we generated our own data model, a middleware and a connection to specialised computing services that allowed us to optimise the routes. These optimisations gave place in some particular cases to savings of up to 40% (either in the distance, the time, or the CO2 emissions required to complete the routes).