LAB. DO TERRITORIO (G.I. 1934-TB)

Lab. do Territorio / News

Publicada por Lab. Territorio

Logistics and optimization of collection routes and location of manure treatment plants: combination of GIS tools with mathematical models


Since 2023 several groups of the University of Santiago have been working on the Agromanure  project for the "Development of an integrated management system of livestock manure generated in farms in northern Spain based on the development of high-quality fertilizers" funded by the Spanish national call for projects “Ecological and Digital Transition PRTR 2021”.


The Land Laboratory and the Territorial Information System contributed to the management of the logistics of the proposed system, and to the management of all the associated geospatial information. As it corresponds to the type of call of the National Plan of Scientific Research, most of the activities consist of testing novel approaches, models and tools that generate new knowledge that can be then applied in closer-to-practice initiatives and projects.
 
Within the challenge of the logistics for the treatment of surplus manure, the combination of GIS tools with mathematical models for territorial analysis and decision making on the optimal locations of treatment plants and collection routes, was the subject of the final Master's thesis of the student Martina Martinez Soto, graduate of the “Master in Planning and Land Management” in July 2024.
 
Martina addressed in her work “Development of a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) for the installation of a slurry processing plant and its transport and distribution routes in the south of Lugo” the combination of traditional multicriteria analysis in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with mathematical optimization models such as p-median or k-means more typical of mathematical packages such as RStudio.
 
The results show the effectiveness of this combination for analysis and decision making in a sustainable and creditable system, but they also identify the limitations of the current tools as long as they cannot take into account several simultaneous variables specific to this problem such as production volume and daily collection rate.

The project AGROMANURE (TED2021-129533B-I00) is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the State Research Agency, through funds by the European Union.