A decision support system for urban waste management

This paper describes a decision support system, for urban waste management in a regional area, to be used for evaluating general policies for service organisation of the collection and for identifying areas suitable for locating waste treatment and disposal plants. The Decision Support System (DSS) is applied to selected provinces in Sicily. The decision support system allows the generation and evaluation of suitable alternatives with respect to salient features of the problem, especially environmental consequences. The paper describes the identification and collection of relevant information, the structuring of a database, the design of combinatorial optimisation algorithms for solving the core location problem, the study of models for evaluating the different alternatives and their framing in a complete multicriteria decision model. Finally, the solution of the case study, by means of the DSS, is described.