Heuristic Guidelines

1. The old system of assigning routes based on experience and intuition is systematized by the formulation of some simple rules.

2. However, its effectiveness depends upon the experience of the user. The macro routing is to be done first, followed by route balancing and micro routing.

3. In the macro routing, collection areas are assigned to disposal facilities. A fair days work is determined in terms of km to be traveled, the trip made and tonnage to be hauled per day.

4. This helps in identifying blocks or areas that can be served by a vehicle and its crew every day.

5. Micro routing is then carried out by using heuristics when the originally identified blocks or areas and their configuration may get changed.

6. The factors to be considered in micro-routing are:

   Existing policies regarding the collection and its frequency should be identified.

   Routes should not be fragmented or overlapped.

   Collection and transport time should be reasonably constant for each route so as to equalize the workload.

   Routes having heavy traffic should be served before or after rush hours only.

Optimization of Vehicle Routes

1. The vehicles move along various streets and collect the solid waste from several collection points and when full, proceed to the transfer station/processing/disposal site.

2. Presently, the routes of movement of these vehicles are arbitrarily fixed, usually by the supervisor on the basis of his experience and convenience.

3. These routes are not necessarily the best routes and certainly not optimum and result in underutilization of the vehicles and increased cost of transportation.

4. In this way, for proper utilization of the materials, optimization of collection routes is necessary.