Municipal waste collection in Ponte de Lima, Portugal – A vehicle routing application

Between 40 and 60 per cent of a community's waste management system costs are due to the collection of waste from containers to disposal facilities. In Ponte de Lima, a municipality in the north of Portugal, collection plans are still made by hand. This article describes the work done to apply optimization methods to obtain efficient plans with reduced collection costs, highly dependent on the distance travelled by collecting vehicles. It focuses on all the steps needed to solve the problem, that is analysis of the problem, gathering of the data requirements and handling of the available data to deal with problems such as lack of information, problem complexity and the need of not disrupting current practices. A visiting calendar for each container and a 1‐week plan of daily routes for the vehicles were delivered to the municipality. With these plans, we estimate reductions of 26 per cent in the total distance travelled by the vehicles.