| dc.description.abstract | During the last few decades, medical waste vehicle routing problems have
drawn great attention from academic researchers and practitioners because of the huge
amount of operating costs from various healthcare services, especially in urban areas.
This study aims to solve a real case study related to waste collection in Thu Duc
district, Ho Chi Minh city by providing a set of routes with minimum total traveled
costs. The waste collection process involves the following steps: i) each vehicle starts
from a depot, ii) visits a number of customers to collect waste, iii) empties waste at the
disposal facility, and lastly, iv) returns to the depot. The medical waste collection
vehicle routing problem with time windows (WCVRPTW) considers multiple disposal
sites and drivers’ rest periods. There are two methods used in this thesis. First, a
mixed-integer programming model will be proposed to find exact solutions. Then, the
Nearest Greedy algorithm will be applied to generate near-optimal solutions. The
results of the Nearest Greedy algorithm is compared with the exact solutions. The
solutions obtained by the Nearest Greedy algorithm are highly competitive with 300
times faster in terms of computation time and a slight gap of 8.81% with regards to
average objective value compared to the exact ones. | en_US |
