Cost-effective municipal unions formation within intermediate regions under prioritized waste energy recovery

Waste-to-Energy technology is a promising approach, that should help to mitigate risk of energy crisis and to overcome problem with increasing waste generation. The European union actively promotes energy recovery from waste in its policies and limits landfilling of utilizable waste. These legally induced changes substantially affect municipalities: waste treatment becomes more expensive and complex. To react to these up-coming complications, it is beneficial to create municipal unions, focused on the cooperation in waste management operations. Such municipal unions help to lower waste treatment costs and to optimize waste collection. This paper applies general cooperative game theory approach to study how municipalities cooperate within regions of intermediate urban-rural type. Novel distributed dynamic coalition formation algorithm is used to describe process of unions' creation. Moreover, on the basis of sampling Shapley value, suitable financial transfers within unions are proposed. The paper also presents a review of current applications of game theory to energetics, validates proposed method using the Czech Republic interregional case study and discusses the conducted sensitivity analysis. Results suggest the most suitable municipal unions for adaptation to new waste treatment legislative and demonstrate that through cooperation municipalities are able to save up to 8% of waste treatment costs.(c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.