Handling Varied Waste Types

Product Used: Route Optimization API

Background

A city’s waste collection department services both residential neighborhoods and industrial zones. While residential areas primarily generate general and organic waste, industrial zones often generate hazardous waste, like chemicals and batteries, which have strict handling and disposal regulations. To ensure safety, hazardous materials must be collected separately and transported along routes that avoid residential areas and highly populated zones. Additionally, some industrial zones generate recyclable waste that needs special processing.

Problem Identification

The waste collection company want to efficiently handle:

1. Diverse waste types: Without proper routing to separate waste types, collection trucks often follow inefficient routes, mixing general waste with hazardous or recyclable materials.
2. Regulatory Compliance: Regulatory agencies mandate that hazardous waste should be transported along predefined, less-populated routes to minimize risks. Mixing regular and hazardous waste or incorrectly routing hazardous materials can result in regulatory fines or safety hazards.
3. Operational Inefficiency: Dispatching separate trucks for each waste type without optimized routing can lead to unnecessary mileage and fuel usage.

Solution

NextBillion.ai Route Optimization API’s rich feature set allows handling different types of wastes as well as taking care of routes which meet regulatory compliance. By specifying `skills` to denote different types of wastes and using `profiles` to specify hazardous materials routing constraints, the waste management department can easily tackle the route planning challenges.

Setting Waste Type Requirements

The waste management system is configured to recognize different waste types—general, organic, recyclable, and hazardous. Each type is assigned specific handling requirements, such as the need for separate trucks, designated disposal sites, or restricted transport routes for hazardous materials.

We start by identifying the different types of waste and denoting a separate skill for collection, handling each of the waste types.

While building the problem statement for waste collection, we use these codes to indicate the type of load to be picked up from a location and which load type the vehicle can carry. For a pickup task, we specify skills: [102], to indicate Industrial Waste. For the vehicles, we specify skills:[101, 103], to indicate that the truck can handle both residential as well as recyclable wastes. Customizing Routes Based on Waste Type In case the waste management department uses different types of trucks for different types of wastes, the route optimization service automatically generates routes for each truck based on the waste type it’s assigned to collect. We use profiles to define the routing characteristics for each truck carrying each of different waste types. For example, routing profile for a truck responsible for carrying hazardous waste is defined as:

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"routing":{
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       "profiles":{
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           "Hazardous_waste":{
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               "truck_size": "250,280,450", 
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               "truck_weight": 15000, 
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               "mode": "truck", 
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               "avoid": [ 
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                   "highway"
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               ],
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               "hazmat_type":["general", "circumstantial"] 
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           }
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	}

Sample API request and response

Here is a complete JSON request that we built for this case and the corresponding response.

API Request

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curl --location 'https://api.nextbillion.io/optimization/v2?key=<your_api_key>' --header 'Content-Type: application/json' --data '{...}'

API Response

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{
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    "description": "Handling Varied Waste Types",
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    "result": {...}'
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    "status": "Ok",
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    "message": ""
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}

As we can see the collection for respective waste types were assigned to only those vehicles which are designated for that waste type. In summary, NextBillion.ai Route Optimization can effectively handle varied waste types and their specific routing requirements to overcome significant challenges for the waste management department, particularly for hazardous waste types. This approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also ensures safety and compliance with environmental and safety regulations.