How To Automate The Planning Of Logistics In The Waste And Recycling Industry

Route planning in waste collection becomes increasingly complex, while it is getting harder to acquire experienced personnel on the market.
Therefore, automated route planning incorporating key restrictions and challenges is essential to minimize manual planning effort.

Without a doubt, route planning is a complex task in the waste industry. An isolated view on capacity, costs and legal requirements is not leading to an optimal result. It therefore is essential to consider them holistically. However, finding qualified staff is becoming harder. The limited local knowledge of districts to be planned makes centralized planning inefficient while pressure rises to improve competitiveness. In addition to that, a growing number of bans on Diesel-powered vehicles is making route planning more difficult. And further challenges like planning routes for electric or hydrogen vehicles are just on the doorstep.

I am sure at this point such first capabilities inside SAP Waste and Recycling, cloud edition by PROLOGA can help SAP Waste and Recycling customers to make a significant step ahead: The automated route planning minimizes the manual effort on the planning process, enables its centralization and optimizes the planning scenarios.

The automated route planning can work easily across different disposing types as well as many depots and waste disposal plants. It can handle specific opening hours as well as different departure and arrival times of the vehicles. Above all, we considered the following key factors:

• Available personnel and vehicles
• Vehicle payload
• Geographical data (e.g. position of depots and plants)
• Commercial data (e.g. costs of personnel and vehicles including costs of overtime hours and unloading costs for each plant)
• Logistical data (e.g. distance and driving time)
• Regulatory data (e.g. maximum driving time, maximum working time)

The algorithm is able calculate the best plant option based on costs for unloading and cost of cartage and choses the appropriate plant for the route.
Taking all the mentioned data into account the algorithm creates route planning scenarios heuristically and the planner decides which scenario to choose. A digital map provides full transparency for the calculated planning scenarios.

SAP Waste and Recycling, cloud edition by PROLOGA is a cloud service providing waste management companies with an automated route planning for a commercial route collection scenario as first initial capability. There are no further costs of installing or running hardware attached as you only pay per planned route.
I would recommend using SAP S/4HANA with SAP Waste and Recycling and the extension SAP S/4HANA for waste and recycling by PROLOGA as source system for master data and order data. However, the required data can also be imported via a predefined interface from any other system into the cloud.

The service can easily be accessed via the user-friendly front end of SAP UI5 Apps in the SAP Cloud Platform.
You are welcome to ask questions in our community under the tag SAP Waste and Recycling. You will also find questions from other interested parties there later.