A Heuristic Approach to Locating a Landfill Site in the Sekondi- Takoradi Metropolis of Ghana

Abstract

The rise in the urban population of developing countries in the past decade has brought the necessity to develop environmentally sustainable and efficient waste management systems. Sanitary landfill constitutes one of the primary methods of municipal solid waste disposal. Optimized siting has gained considerable importance in order to ensure minimum damage to the environment. Despite an increase in alternative techniques for disposing of waste, landfill site still remains the primary means of waste disposal. This study seeks to find the optimal location of a landfill site in the Sekondi -Takoradi metropolis. The problem was formulated as an Integer Programming model and the solution was presented through an ant colony based meta-heuristic for the Travelling Salesman Problem. The data on distances were taken from potential collection points and also Cartesian coordinates of the collection points were collected and used for each sub-metro. The optimal solutions were obtained with the aid of a MATLAB implementation codes. The Ant Colony results revealed that the best location for an additional landfill site is Apremedo with a route length of a 133.35miles.

Keywords: Ant colony, Travelling Salesman Problem, Landfill site, Optimization and Integer Programming.