City of Edmond, Oklahoma

GBB was contracted by the City of Edmond, Oklahoma to completely re-route the residential collection system in this city of 70,000 people, encompassing 85 square miles. The City provides weekly automated collection to 27,000 residences using one or two 105-gallon carts. This project was done on a service bureau basis as the most cost effective approach for Edmond. Under the service bureau approach, the City did not have to buy and maintain the FleetRoute routing software but contracted for finished routes. The deliverables included: (1) detailed route path maps, (2) street-by-street travel direction reports, and (3) a customer sequence listing.

The City of Edmond provided GBB FleetRoute Services with a GIS database with all customers’ addresses matched to the streets on which they belong, with the side of the street identified and a customer ID. The City also identified, by ID, those customers that were exceptions to the norm, such as: (1) customers serviced on the side street (not the front street where the house address matches to – a so-called corner customer) and (2) customers that require service times other than the default value. Service time is defined as the elapsed time from the moment the truck stops in front of a customer until the moment the truck begins to move again. Actual scale weight data was used to assess the set-out size for customers. FleetRoute was enhanced to control u-turns on major roadways. Also, high traffic areas and schools were routed so the collection occurs at specific times during the day. Narrow streets that disallowed the trucks to turn around were increased in travel time and displayed as pull-in, pull-out map reports.

The results were a reduction in the number of routes from 40 to 30 resulting in significant operational savings.

In Task One, GBB developed new optimized routes, using the FleetRoute™ Route Optimization software, that didn’t utilize the current collection day of week. Task Two compared the new routes with routes optimized for current collection day of week. The outcome of the second task was that the efficiency improvements were minimal from entirely switching the current collection day of week to new collection days. Thus, it was deemed that new routes should be developed that follow the current collection days, without sacrificing the time balance between the routes, i.e., maximizing the efficiency of all of the routes. These routes maintained the current collection day of week, as closely as possible, while keeping the routes balanced by time. This new task was the third task for the routing of the City’s automated trash collection. The goal in this routing was to allow some modifications of collection days, but this was minimized to the greatest extent possible.

Relevant information from the City’s Tower waste management software (e.g., number of containers, container size, current day of week service, etc.) was imported and merged into the FleetRoute customer database by GBB FleetRoute Services using the Automated Route Updater. The City arranged with Transcomp to produce the import/export file with current account data. An updated Tower file, created by FleetRoute, was returned to the City reflecting the new routes.