Gated Recurrent Unit for Landfill Area Estimation Based on Municipal Solid Waste Prediction
International journal of intelligent engineering and systems · 2023
Solid waste management is an imperative aspect of a hygienic environment.Lack of attention towards solid waste management leads to environmental pollution which causes catastrophic health issues and reduces the quality of life.Therefore, it's required to develop environmentally safe and adequate protocols to manage solid waste for the fortification of human health and the environment.The study presents a master plan to facilitate the local municipal authorities in developing a better waste management framework.The main aim of the research is to predict municipal solid waste (MSW) collection by using the GRU model in Multan city, Pakistan.The GRU model has utilized a dataset collected through a weighbridge at Habiba Sial landfill site (HSLS) which is the most reliable source for the data.The dataset consists of monthly data for the past five years with a total of 180 records; 60 records for months 60 records for vehicle trip numbers and 60 for collected MSW.The number of months and monthly vehicle trip numbers have been used as the input data and monthly collected MSW has been used as output data.The window of time for collected data is June 2017 through June 2022.The dataset has been divided into 3 subparts where 70% of the data has been utilized for model training, 15% of the data has been used for model testing and 15% of the data has been utilized for validation purposes.The GRU model's performance has been evaluated by using the performance metrics; mean square error (MSE), and Regression values for training, testing, and validation data.According to the results, 2-5-2-1 topology with 5 hidden neurons gives the best results with the least value of MSE being 0.0388 and the maximum value of regression being 0.94.The study also proposed a master plan for waste management, considering options like landfilling, recycling, incineration, and composting.As the landfilling method is the most common practice to dispose of waste, therefore the study estimated the required landfill area based on the predicted solid waste generation rate and its collection rate by the year 2031 for Multan city, Pakistan.The master plan can be utilized alternatively, especially for the cities with the same type of demographics which may help the municipal authorities for the development of a better solid waste management framework.