Sequential Ordering Of Routes for Trucks for Efficient Garbage Collection: Case Study of Sekondi –Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly (STMA)

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2012-06-14
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Abstract
Transportation of solid waste product from the cities in Ghana to the destinations for proper disposal has become a unique aim of most metropolitan assemblies in order to make the cities clean from dirt and thereby prevent the outbreak of some diseases and also make the environment smell good. Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly (STMA) has trucks to run to and from various garbage collection points for disposal. It is hard to believe that most of the garbage containers may get full but the trucks may not be available for collection due to the fact that the trucks may not operate effectively and efficiently. A careful study revealed that all the systems on which most of the officers assign truck to a specific route for garbage collection have no scientific basis. This resulted into inefficient ordering of trucks to routes. This work presents a case study of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The core objective is to minimize the total lengths taken by trucks of the Waste Management Department of Sekondi-Takoradi Metropolitan Assembly in transporting the waste from the Metropolis to the Dump Site. The problem was formulated as an Integer Programming Model and the Ant Colony Meta-heuristic for the Travelling Salesman Problem was used in obtaining optimal solution. Data on distances between potential garbage picking points were obtained. The Cartesian coordinates of the various garbage collection points were collected and used as the distance matrix table for each zone. The optimal solutions were obtained with the help of a Matlab implementation codes. The results revealed an outstanding performance of the Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm in terms of efficiency. In summary, there is reduction of total cost by GH$56000.35 which is 35% of the total cost.
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A thesis Submitted to Department of Mathematics, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science (Industrial Mathematics.
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