A heuristic approach to the facility location problem for waste management: A case study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a model for the waste processing facility location problem in selected regions of the Czech Republic and to test a heuristic algorithm that would provide an effective solution to similar larger problems. Within this context, it is understood that the facility location decisions are made on the basis of the minimization of the total costs. The total costs include waste collection costs, facility location investments (or waste treatment costs) and penalty costs for underutilized capacity. Two modelled problems are illustrated on the basis of two examples of limited size. In order to determine whether similar, larger problems can be solved e.g. covering the whole of the Czech Republic, a heuristic algorithm is put forward and test computations performed. The algorithm used in this paper is a novel variant of Success-History Based Parameter Adaptation for Differential Evolution which implements Multi-Chaotic parent selection (MC-SHADE).