Robust Facility Location Problem for Bio-waste Transportation

Abstract

The article presents an optimisation tool for bio-waste facility allocation. The quantity of bio-waste produced in individual territorial units is a key factor for the selection of localities when constructing a new facility. Bio-waste production changes over the course of the year and differs between various types of housing developments. Separation rate is a determining factor for bio-waste production. Readiness to separate the waste reflects the total quantity of bio-waste produced. Predicting the future of bio-waste production is a complex problem, and it would be suitable to consider more developed scenarios. The introduced tool takes into consideration additional possible scenarios for production and provides a robust solution from the point of view of a locality suggestion for the construction of the processing facility. The optimisation model is based on the two-stage stochastic programming approach. The decision regarding the locality for the construction of a new facility is made during the first stage. This method is called the “Here-and-Now” approach. The results are presented in a case study for a selected region in the Czech Republic. Since changes to the legislation in 2014, municipalities are now supposed to provide the possibility to collect the bio-waste of citizens. This has caused significant growth in production – about 20 % annually over the past few years. At this point, it is very complicated to estimate a future trend based on the historical data. Due to this reason, it would be appropriate to consider future bio-waste production across more scenarios. In order to enable the applicability of the tool on a large area with many nodes, it would be necessary to adapt the computation method according to its computational complexity.