Formulation and solution technique for agricultural waste collection and transport network design

Abstract

Agricultural waste management in developing countries has become a challenging issue for rural planners due to the lack of an efficient planning tool. In the countries, farmers burnt agricultural waste at fields after each harvesting season to solve the issue. As a result, it has caused air and water pollution in the rural areas of the countries. In this paper, we present a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model for agricultural waste collection and transport network design that aims to stop burning waste and use the waste to produce bio-organic fertilizer. The model supports rural planners to optimally locate waste storages, and to determine the optimal set of routes for a fleet of vehicles to collect and transport the waste from the storages to the bio-organic fertilizer production facility. In the novel location-assignment-routing problem, the overall objective is to minimize total cost of locating storages, collecting waste from fields and planning vehicle routes. A solution technique is developed to linearise the mixed-integer nonlinear programming model into a model in linear form. In addition, a parallel water flow algorithm is developed to solve efficiently the large-sized instances. The efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm is validated and evaluated on the real case study in Trieu Phong district, Quang Tri province, Vietnam, as well as a set of randomly generated large-sized instances. The results show that our solution approach outperforms the general optimisation solver and tabu search algorithm. Our algorithm can find the optimal or near-optimal solutions for the large-sized instances within a reasonable time.