Capacity planning for waste management systems

The capacity planning problem examined in this paper has a number of applications in the environmental management area including municipal solid waste management, hazardous waste treatment and disposal, and municipal wastewater sludge management. A dynamic programming formulation is presented for the specific capacity planning problem, and considerations of problem structure that allow computational efficiencies are discussed. This long-term planning model is applied to hypothetical and case-study problems from the municipal solid waste management area. The problem is generalized and compared to other problem types in the capacity planning literature.