Deployment of refuse vehicles in a protean environment

In this paper we use the protean philosophy to deploy refuse vehicles for solid waste collection in a city where the waste collection fleet is old and the number of vehicles is often not sufficient to meet the demand of the day. The usual practice in the past has been to assign one truck to one region but often it is the case that the number of operational vehicles may not be sufficient to serve each region by a separate vehicle. We consider a case when the amount of refuse to be removed on a particular day cannot be serviced by the existing operational fleet of vehicles in performing one trip. As such some or all vehicles need to do more than a single trip to clear the volume of refuse available on that day. A heuristic approach is proposed to deal with such a situation.