WasteLogs: a decision support tool for strategic waste collection

Waste collection management has seen an increasing interest in the OR community these past years. This is due to the wide range of Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems (CVRP) studied and the growing trend in studying sustainability-related problems.
For waste collection companies, it can be challenging to identify the type of strategy most suitable for a given situation. On the one hand, the complexity of the state-of-the-art algorithms presented in the literature; on the other hand, the data needed for these algorithms can be challenging to obtain and encode.
In partnership with Alpenluft, a Swiss waste collection consulting company, and the Innosuisse agency supporting R&D projects, we developed the WasteLogs application, a user-friendly strategic waste collection decision tool. The application offers interfaces allowing the encoding of the collection points, the amounts of waste to collect, and the collection strategy in different features that can be combined to generate a routing for collection vehicles. There are currently three state-of-the-art collection strategies implemented in the tool. Each algorithm minimizes the CO2 emissions through heuristic methods; the user can then identify what collection strategy is the most suitable and extract the information needed to import them into GPS systems. WasteLogs also allows importing existing collection tours to evaluate whether they can be improved.