Vehicle routing optimization for improving fleet fuel efficiency : a case study in Sydney, Australia

Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a classic combinatorial optimization problem involved in many applications. VRP is even a big concern when the vehicle is a garbage truck, which travels approximately 100 km/day with the average consumption of 1 litre/km. For this reason, a small improvement in collection activities may result in significant savings in overall cost, fuel and therefore greenhouse-gas emissions. The primary goal of this research is to find ways to reduce overall travel distance for collection and transport of municipal solid waste from residential homes within the Blacktown City Area in order to reduce the fuel consumption and therefore greenhouse-gas emissions. Esri’s ArcGIS 10.3 Network Analyst extension has been used in this study. To calculate optimal routes for solid waste collection, several inputs to the ArcGIS Network Analyst solver have been used including: collection points represented the depot start point, the home rooftops where the garbage is collected and the unload point. The results of this study show that: Using an optimized route instead of a regular route can reduce the total travelled distance by 8 km/day on the pilot site. The optimized route will reduce that individual truck’s emissions by 5.5 kg CO2 per day for that collection area. This represents a reduction of about 8% for that particular collection.