A fuzzy linear programming approach for optimal planning in solid waste management

Solid waste management is a strategic issue for municipals and related corporations. Because related corporations must allocate some of their budget for the disposal of the solid wastes, and this budgets increase with the increasing of consumption. On the other hand, they are seeking to reduce cost minimizing of disposal for all types of solid wastes. In other words, they have to dispose wastes; otherwise the community?s health and environmental conditions will be under high risks. The elusion of solid wastes involves five activities to do. These activities are collection, transportation, treatment, incineration and land-filling. All of these activities have a cost to be supported. In the real life the incidents are very complicated and often linguistic. Because of that it is very difficult to adapt these incidents to the mathematical programs. In this dissertation we searched about the minimum costs for collection, transportation, treatment, incineration and land-filling of the solid wastes in a system, that has three collecting centers, two treatment centers, two incineration centers and two land-filling centers. Also we considered the real life condition about the quantity of the solid wastes that are collected from the system. In this concern, fuzzy linear programming model is developed to address these problems. Because of the uncertain nature of the parameters and decision makers? aspiration levels for the goal, fuzzy modeling approach is employed in the model. This study consists of six sections. In the first section, the topics of the study is introduced, in second, general knowledge about the solid wastes is expressed, in third, detailed data about solid waste management, solid wastes and disposal techniques about solid wastes are expressed. In the fourth section, fuzzy logic and fuzzy linear programming that employed to the proposed model is explained. In the fifth section, the fuzzy linear program is proposed; the proposed model is digitized and solved. Proposed model is solved by a linear and integer modeling program that named WinQSB. Also in the fifth section, results are analyzed and optimal solution is explained. In the last section the study is concluded and comments about further studies is expressed. Keywords: Solid waste management, fuzzy logic, fuzzy linear programming.