Optimal Management of Solid Waste in Smart Cities using Internet of Things

Smart cities are benefiting from Internet of Things (IoT) in optimizing their services. Smart waste management systems can provide substantial savings in time, monetary cost, trip length and utilization of vehicles. In this paper, we use the IoT technology to determine the schedule and pathways of waste collection trucks. We discuss our previous work on single truck routing algorithm and develop and simulate two-step heuristic algorithm multiple trucks routing algorithm (MITRA) to discover the ideal route for the management waste fleet, using smart dumpsters and agent-based models. The smart dumpsters are equipped with the sensors that measure levels of waste and a controller to send updates to the central management system using wireless network. Our target is to improve the waste collection process by reducing the congestion on the road, the service time spent and the overall trip length. We developed the MITRA algorithm applying the timing constraint on capacitated vehicle routing problem. MITRA divides the metropolitan area into a set of sectors each containing a number of dumpsters. We guide the routing in waste collection by selecting the order of sectors to be served then then apply genetic algorithm to compute the optimal route to serve the full dumpsters in the sector.