Solid-waste management system analysis with noise control and traffic congestion limitations

Conventional location/allocation models for solid-waste management usually focus on economic optimization with respect to mass balance, capacity limitation, operating, and financial constraints. But the siting of important facilities, such as landfills, incinerators, and transfer stations, in a solid-waste management system still involves several explicit limitations that must be considered through the use of optimization techniques. This paper presents a sustainable waste management strategy in which the decision makers and the environmental analysts may put forward their views on the assimilative capacity of two major environmental factors: noise control and traffic congestion. A mixed integer programming model with the framework of dynamic optimization still can be used efficiently to achieve this goal. The practical implementation is assessed by the case study of the Kaohsiung solid-waste management system in Taiwan. It shows that the incorporation of these two environmental factors does alter the conventional waste-flow pattern in metropolitan solid-waste management systems.