Reactive tabu search approach for scheduling solid waste collection problems

Abstract

The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) is an arc routing problem which involves determining a fleet of homogeneous size vehicles and designing the routes that minimizes the total cost. CARP with customers located along the edges of the network is an NP-hard problem and one such problem is in the designing of household vehicle collection tours with each vehicles is limited in its capacity. This study proposed to develop new solution approach known as Reactive Tabu Search (RTS) heuristic method to solve the CARP. The RTS solution algorithm adopts a dynamic tabu list rather than static tabu list as in the classical Tabu Search (TS). The newly developed algorithm had generated a good solution for solving solid waste collection problems for the city of Johor Bahru, Malaysia. It produced a much better results compared to the classical TS approach.