Route optimization of electric garbage truck fleet in sustainable energy and environmental management

Solid waste management has gathered a more important position together especially with the increasing environmental awareness in the world. The solid waste management has different steps. However, one of the most important steps here is the collection and transportation of solid wastes. The garabage trucks that provide the collection of solid wastes within the mentioned process is a conventional fuel consumer similar to the other parties of transportation area. Here, specifically the mentioned conventional fuel consumption brings significantly important adverse results from envorinment point of view and the transportation area has the greatest share in this consumption. The usage of alternative fuels based vehicles in different areas of transportation sector comes into prominence and herein the electric vehicles are one of the most important areas of investment. In this manner, in this thesis a route optimization study have been conducted for electric garbage trucks. Generic Algebraic Modeling System (GAMS) that is widely used in the literature an deven in the industry has been employed for solving the optimization problem. Different studies exist in the literature for the route optimization of conventional fuels based garbage trucks. However, to our best knowledge, no studies exist that consider the electric garbage trucks. Besides, it is not easy to reach the detailed garbage collection area information in the literature. In this manner, data have been obtained by real field measurements in a region within the service area of Bakirkoy Municipality and accordingly an unit energy consumption value that can be considered as a reference in the future has been obtained. The reality of this value has been presented by comparative analyses. Besides, real road information data have been integrated to the data used as input while assessing the optimization approach and the system analyses have been conducted in a more realistic concept. The benefits that the mentioned optimization algorithm offers have been discussed comparatively using real data. Keywords: Electric vehicles, garbage trucks, route optimization, solid waste management