Cooperative Inter-Municipal Waste Collection: A Multi Agent System Approach

The cooperative inter-municipal waste collection can be a real added value in terms of costs reduction and high performance services. The chapter proposes a Multi Agent Approach to support the inter-municipal infrastructure. The Multi Agent Systems (MAS) is an approach suitable to implement a distributed physically problem as the inter-municipal waste collection. The architecture of the approach is formalized by work-flow analysis: a static view by IDEF0 diagram and a dynamic view by UML activity diagram. This analysis promotes the cooperation among municipalities to manage the waste collection service in an optimal way. According to Italian laws, the municipalities are responsible for organizing the management of municipal waste in agreement with the principles of transparency, efficiency, effectiveness and inexpensiveness. The coordination protocol among the agents allows to divide the costs among the municipalities in an efficient way. Finally, a discrete event simulation environment is developed to test the proposed MAS architecture. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-981-1.ch015