Optimal Routing for Infectious Waste Collection
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 125, Issue 5
Abstract
Most small to medium-sized hospitals and clinics in Taiwan do not have on-site treatment facilities for their medical and infectious wastes and must rely on outside agencies for its collection and treatment. The problem of optimally planning and scheduling the collection of medical wastes from a disperse group of facilities is formulated as a periodic vehicle routing problem. Special attention is paid to the requirement that waste pickup be made on at least a weekly basis. A two-phased approach is used to solve the resulting optimization model. The first phase solves a standard vehicle routing problem to determine a set of individual routes for the collection vehicles. The second phase uses mixed-integer programming to assign routes to particular days of the week. An illustrative example for 38 hospitals in the Taipei city area demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 125 • Issue 5 • May 1999
Pages: 479 - 484
History
Received: Jun 14, 1998
Published online: May 1, 1999
Published in print: May 1999
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