Investigation of the imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) and its Application in Urban Services by Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) model

Nowadays, the speed at which municipalities provide urban services and collect urban waste play an important role in improving the efficiency of this organization, and therefore, the satisfaction of the citizens. In recent decades, due to the dominance of consumerism culture in Third World countries, especially Iran, we witness an increase in the urban waste each and every single day. In spite of the modernization of waste collection machines, the service delivery speed has been neglected although it has always had a significant impact on cost reduction and quality of service delivery. The city of Ardabil is no exception to this. It has four districts and 100 large and small neighborhoods in total that have always encountered the municipality with a major problem in terms of the rate at which urban wastes was collected and thus provided a beautiful outlook of the city. This article aims at adding the speed as a factor to the waste collection units by proposing the best route for the machines via Travelling Salesman Problem approach and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm in MATLAB environment. Using the appropriate programming and defining those 100 neighborhoods for the model, the most optimal routes for the municipality’s service units are introduced provided that the service units pass each neighborhood once and at the end return to the starting point again. The results of the study showed that the algorithm used in this research for 100 neighborhoods in those four districts can provide the optimal solution with the repetition of 200 and respectively with the values of 99, 91, 93, and 97 and within the intervals of 30, 22, 30, and 24 seconds.