Cost-Effective and Equitable Workload Operation in Solid-Waste Management Systems

System analysis for solid-waste management has received wide attention from both economic and environmental planners because of the complex nature of these services. This paper describes the important issues of cost-effectiveness and workload constraints in the optimization of solid-waste collection, recycling, treatment, and disposal systems. Sequential application of nonlinear programming and integer programming is used to direct generated waste to recycling, treatment, and disposal facilities at minimum cost and to allocate waste collection duties between existing collection vehicles and labor evenly among service areas. In particular, it demonstrates how equitably operational requirements in solid-waste management systems can be achieved by using specific goal constraints in an integer programming model, combined with a nonlinear programming model to minimize total operational costs. A case study shows that the optimal strategies obtained from such an analysis can successfully reduce system direct cost and generate relatively reasonable operational programs in a large-scale solid-waste management system.