An optimization routing model for collecting infectious medical waste

Most small to medium–sized clinics and hospitals in Indore do not have on-site treatment facilities for their medicals and infectious wastes and must rely on outside agencies for its collection and treatment. In this paper the problem of optimally planning and scheduling the collection of medical wastes from a disperse group of facilities is formulated as a PVRP. Special attention is given to the requirement that waste pickup be made on at least a weekly basis. Optimization model consist of two phase: first phase solves a standard VRP to determine the set of individual routes for the collection vehicles by SFCOP (space filling curve with optimal partitioning) approach. Whereas second phase assigns routes to particular days of the week by mixed-integer programming. Also an illustrative example demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.