S.A.F. Hassan & S.Z. Nordin/Malaysian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences Vol.11, No.2 (2015) 62-66 Tabu Search Algorithm for Solving Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem Siti Asnor Faraien Binti Hassan a , Syarifah Zyurina Nordin b, * a,b Department of Mathematic Science, Faculty of Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia. *Corresponding Author: szyurina@utm.my Article history : Article history : Received 30 Sept 2014 Accepted 13 Apr 2015 GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT ABSTRACT This study considers a Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem where the situation happens when vehicle must make a complete trip to make disposal operation per day. The Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem objective is to decide the best solution where a vehicle should make the collection first between the customers since there exist larger number of customers. The method proposed to solve the Waste Collection Vehicle Routing Problem is by using Tabu Search Algorithm. Keywords: Vehicle Routing Problem, Waste Collection, Tabu Search Algorithm © 2015 Penerbit UTM Press. All rights reserved http://dx.doi.org/10.11113/mjfas.v11n2.348 1. INTRODUCTION The Vehicle Routing Problem or well known as VRP is one of the most studied combinatorial problems that is described as the problem of designing optimal delivery or collection routes from one or several depots to a number of geographically scattered cities or customers,subject to side constraints (Laporte,1991). The objective of VRP is to route the vehicles which is one route per vehicle, starting and ending at the depot, so that all customers are supplied with their demands and the total travel distance is minimized. The VRP is important in the fields of physical distribution and logistics. The distribution of goods concerns the service, in a given time period, a set of customers by a set of vehicles, which are located in one or more depots, are operated by a set of drivers and performs their movements by using an appropriate road network. The waste collection in vehicle routing problem (VRP) is due to disposal operations. Vehicles start or end their routes at the empty depot. Empty vehicles leave the depot and collect waste from customers and then emptying themselves at the waste disposal facilities before return to the depot empty. When a vehicle is full, it needs to go to the disposal facilities (transfer station). A vehicle must make a complete trip to make disposal operation per day. Problem arises when a large number of customers exist so that to decision must be made to decide the best solution where a vehicle should make the collection first between the customers before emptying at disposal facilities. The large number of customers makes the waste collection in VRP becomes complicated because of increasing number of possible solution (n!). If the number of customers is given by N which is large, therefore we have to solve N! of possible solution. Heuristic algorithm is a procedure that is used to find a good feasible solution that is at least reasonably close to being optimal. The classical algorithm was first proposed by Clarke and Wright (1964) to solve CVRP.Another popularly known heuristic algorithm is tabu search (TS). The best solution at each iteration in the neighborhood of the current solution is selected as the new current solution, even if it leads to an increase in solution cost. It has been used in solving MDVRP with capacity and route length restrictions (Renaud et. al., 1996). TS is used to solve the waste collection VRP problem and to obtain the ordering of the path that produces the shortest distance and the minimum cost. The simplest VRP which only involving only single depot, single disposal facility and the distance between the two customers is Euclidean. It can be calculated using the equation:   = √(  −  ) 2 + (  −  ) 2  ,  = 0,1,2, … (1) 2. LITERATURE REVIEW The basic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most widely studied problems in combinatorial optimization. VRP has started over nearly 50 years ago by Dantzig and Ramser (1959) that introduced capacitated VRP (CVRP) by describing a real – world problem Malaysian Journal of Fundamental and Applied Sciences Vol. 11, No. 2 (2015) 62-66