Estrategia de resolución del problema de ruteo de vehículos aplicado a la recolección y transporte de residuos patológicos generados en establecimientos de salud

Abstract

The main activities related to pathological waste management logistics are the safe operations of collection, transport and unloading at treatment sites for these materials. The coordination of the times of these operations is essential to avoid the proliferation of diseases among health personnel, workers in charge of management and the community in general. The coordination of the different activities involved results in a complex decision-making problem, even more so if the stochastic behavior of pathological waste generation is considered. In this context, the work presents a linear integer mixed mathematical model based on the concept of light robustness and a computationally efficient solution strategy for the problem of regular operation of collection and transport, to its place of treatment, of pathological waste generated in health establishments, such as hospitals and sanatoriums. The problem consists of a vehicle routing problem of the type capacitated and with multiple trips. Vehicle routing problems are characterized as combinatorial optimization NP-hard. Therefore, the solvers commonly used to solve Integer Mathematical Programming problems usually fail to find an optimal solution in a reasonable execution time. Hence the need to implement some particular technique that allows solving the problem in an efficient time. The paper deals with a real case taken from the literature and details the proposed resolution methodology.