Desarrollo de modelos y algoritmos para optimizar redes logísticas de residuos sólidos urbanos

Tesis

Resumen

An increasing urbanized and industrialized society, in addition to a shortage of natural resources, has put pressure on the necessity of implementing efficient and sustainable policies that allow the recovery of the resources that are present in our waste, or, at least, allow a suitable final disposition. These policies should not only mitigate the severe environmental impacts associated to garbage mishandling but also, through an inexpensive and straightforward implementation, help to enhance the prosperity of the communities, especially those that are struggling to find a path of sustainable development. Operations Research, a discipline that consists in the development of support tools for the decision-making process through mathematical and computational models, can enormously contribute to obtain efficient systems that satisfy the current society needs without reducing the chances of future generations to have an equally high standard of living. For these reasons, in this Thesis different models to optimize the initial stages in the reverse logistic chain of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) are analyzed. On the first stage, the problem of optimizing the location of garbage accumulation points in an urban area, while considering the aims of reducing investment costs and enhancing the quality of service, is addressed. The models are applied to scenarios that belong to two different cities. The first one is the Argentinian city of Bahía Blanca, where two different multiobjective resolution methods for discrete problems are compared. The second case corresponds to the Uruguayan city of Montevideo, where due to the higher complexity of the analyzed scenarios a slight reform has to be made to the resolution method used in the rst city. In both cases it was possible to obtain a set of multiobjective solutions of the proposed scnarios. The second part of this Thesis focuses on the routing problems in waste management. After an initial revision, it was found that some works consider visual attractiveness in their optimization process, a topic that has not been completely studied yet. A throughout bibliographic review is performed in order to shed some light on the concept of visual attractiveness and its importance for real-world applications. Furthermore, the different metrics that are used in the literature are compared with the aim of nding similarities and making suggestions about the suitability of each metric in different contexts. Finally, a heuristic to that is able to optimize visual attractiveness in a variant of routing problems is proposed.

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http://hdl.handle.net/11336/89598