Designing an integrated municipal solid waste management system using a fuzzy chance-constrained programming model considering economic and environmental aspects under uncertainty.

Abstract

In recent decades, municipal solid waste (MSW) management has become one of the major concerns of human societies. Therefore, an efficient MSW system of collecting, recycling, and disposing is required to be designed, maintained and improved continuously. However, designing a proper waste collection management system by controlling the spread of diseases and environmental pollutants is very costly. To provide an efficient MSW management system, this study proposes an integrated location-allocation problem to plan the operations such as collection, recycling, disposal, and transportation under uncertainty. To deal with the problem uncertainty, a triangular fuzzy number approach is employed and finally, a fuzzy chance-constrained programming model is developed. Moreover, the proposed bi-objective mathematical programming model aims to minimize the total costs and the total volume of pollutant emissions simultaneously. To solve and validate the model, a weighted goal programming (WGP) method is employed and solved by CPLEX solver of GAMS software. Finally, a real case study problem was implemented in Qazvin, Iran. The results showed that, in most cases, increasing the confidence level of the case study problem leads to the improvement of objective functions. Managers can take into account the output of this research provided along with a sensitivity analysis under different conditions.