Vehicle routing for exhausted oil collection

In this paper we present a Vehicle Routing Problem for the collection of exhausted cooking oil in Bali (Indonesia). This is an integral part of a recycling project initiated by the Caritas Suisse, where cooking oil is collected and recycled to obtain bio diesel fuel. The main goals of this project are to help the people in this region, to protect the environment and to make a contribution to combat climate change. In our work we present the underlying real world problem and show how it can be modeled as a Vehicle Routing Problem. We propose a heuristic to tackle this problem and show that we could support the decision process about the optimal location for the processing plant and the optimal number of vehicles with our approach.