Using applied operations research and geographical information systems to evaluate effective factors in storage service of municipal solid waste management systems

One of the important elements of municipal solid waste management (MSWM) system is waste storage service. Residents deal with the system in this stage and the efficiency of waste collection element, the most expensive element of waste management system, relies on the performance of storage service. In this study, the performance of two different models including minimize facilities (MF) and maximize capacitated coverage (MCC) was investigated to find optimal locations for storage stations in Alandasht district located in Mashhad- Iran. Four effective factors including total service coverage, residential engagement, surplus container capacity devoted to each station and the ratio of the standard deviation to the arithmetic mean of solid waste allocated to each station were considered to compare these models. The MF model provided the highest service coverage by proposing 26 stations covering 98.56 percent of total residences. According to 26 stations proposed with MF model, MCC was run with 26, 27, 25 and 24 stations. MCC-27 provided the maximum attendance of residents with 54.47 percent. However, the most economical container distribution to the stations proposed with MCC-24 by presenting the minimum ratio of surplus devoted capacity to total demand, 33.74 percent. Finally, MCC-25 provided better distribution of residents to the storage stations, i.e., the minimum ratio of the standard deviation to the average solid waste devoted to stations, 22.13 percent. service area (SA) analysis applied to MF, MCC-25 and MCC-24 showed more than 60 percent of residences are located between 0 and 100 m walking distance for these analyses.