5th EurAsia Waste Management Symposium (EWMS) 2020, İstanbul, Türkiye, 26 - 28 Ekim 2020, ss.660-665
Abstract: Medical waste generated by hospitals and other medical service points need to be properly disposed of by municipalities in large metropolitan areas. To this end, special vehicles and containers are used in the collection of such waste. The location of the medical service points is known in advance. It is also assumed that the amounts of waste at the medical service points are deterministic and known. Each vehicle starts its route from a central location called the depot and visits a subset of medical service points collecting the waste and delivers to a common incineration/sterilization station. All vehicles are expected to return to the depot after delivery. The objective of this study is to develop a mathematical model to minimize the total distance travelled by all vehicles. The medical waste collection problem is formulated as a classical capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem. A small sized instance of the problem is solved to optimality using the GAMS software. It also generates optimal routes for each vehicle. The results are compared to the current practice and found to result in important reductions in total distance traveled.
Keywords: Medical waste management, Optimization, Vehicle routing problem