3.3. Influence of the dynamic loading process
To investigate and understand the effects of the dynamic change of the vehicle loading process on pollutant emissions and fuel consumption a sensitivity analysis was carried out for one of the new established circuits consisting of 50 ecopoints.
After obtaining the vehicles routes optimized for the shortest time under the assumption of an average constant load increment of 1 m3 at every visited ecopoint, two simulation scenarios were tested: the first was designed assuming that the collected volume increases exponentially along the visited containers; the other was designed assuming that the collected volume along the visited containers decreases exponentially. However, for comparison purposes, the total collected waste volume per route and the sequence of visited ecopoints were kept unchanged in both scenarios, i.e. the same as those obtained in the case of the constant load increment.