A decision support system for urban waste management

Abstract

Abstract: The objective of the project we present is that of implementing and validating a decision support system for urban waste management on a regional area, to be used as a means for evaluating general policies for regional service organisation and, in particular, for identifying areas suitable for locating waste treatment and disposal plants, with special reference to controlled landfill plants. The system works on a prototypical case study, which refers to an area composed of specifically selected provinces in Sicily. For the design and implementation of the system, several topics have been considered, such as the identification of a representative case study, the identification and collection of relevant information and its structuring in databases, the design of combinatorial optimisation algorithms for solving the core location problem, the study of models for evaluating the different alternatives and their framing in a complete multicriteria decision model, the choice of hardware and system software suitable for the implementation of a decision support system supporting all above mentioned activities, and, finally, the solution of the case study by means of the DSS