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Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In developing countries most of the urban dwellers don’t have access to sewer system. People are mostly using “onsite” systems such as septic tanks or pit latrines that need to be emptied periodically, as the densely built urban environment won’t allow new pits to be dug every time they fill up. In the conventional fecal sludge collection systems, authorities are collecting the sludge from house to house and dump on the plant. Fecal sludge collection system is different from traditional vehicle routing and even from solid waste collection system in terms of dynamic collection points, urgency of getting the service and diversity of demand. Due to those vibrant factors authorities are facing proper networking and management problems. This research describes algorithms that can accommodate constraints and prioritized customers who need immediate service. The GPS log data of the fecal sludge collection truck that maintained by Nonthaburi Municipality, Thailand has been considered as the base data during the development of this application. Spatial analysis has been done using Geographic Information Systems (GIS).Tabu Search has been implemented in order to optimize. Basically two algorithms were produced for assisting fecal sludge collection systems. First algorithm was able to produce multiple trip for each vehicle if required considering all the customers having equal priority, time window. The second one was able to perform optimization that can accommodate priority along with the first one. Input for the algorithms were very simple; distance matrix having distance between each customers and plant, customer order with latitude, longitude, order unit, time window, priority and vehicles with capacity. Algorithms were able to produce better result than the actual operation or even from shortest path algorithm in term of distance. After optimization, efficiency of the algorithms were tested with the actual travelling distance. Travelling distance were reduced to half compare to actual cost and it ensured maximum utilization of vehicle capacity by allocating maximum number of customers in each route.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/R59021Z2

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