Simulating Waste Collection in Python with Networks

This report models a waste collection system where one truck follows a route to pick up waste from farms, drops the waste off at farms, and refuels at the company headquarters. The key metric to collect and observe is the fuel efficiency of the truck, measured in terms of waste collected in tons / fuel use in liters. All the code is at the bottom of the article.

The next sections will discuss the rules of the simulation with justifications for choices made along the way, conduct experiments to observe the effect of different truck routing strategies, farm waste rates, and the ratio of farms to sites, on the variable of fuel efficiency. This will be followed by a theoretical analysis of the system to identify the relationship between waste backlog and waste rates.

Modeling

Table 1. Outline of the main rules for the waste collection model

The main rules of the system are highlighted in Table 1. There are also some simplifying assumptions reflecting a rough estimation of a typical dump truck.

Assumptions about fuel, distance, and capacity

This model assumes that a typical dump truck can carry 7 tons of waste and has a fuel capacity of 200L, and an average fuel economy of 6 gallons per mile, informed in part by BadgerTruck (n.d.). This translates to ~2.55km/L. This means that if one unit…