Domestic waste management systems exhibit complex interactions between human behaviours, infrastructure, and policies. Agent-based models (ABMs) are convenient to study the effects of complex interactions. This systematic review of the only 32 existing domestic waste management ABMs examines how they model the human population, their different types of waste, their behaviours affecting the flows, and their relations to the various technical infrastructure and governance components dedicated to waste. Our results reveal: the scarcity of the modelling of the generation of waste and the prevention behaviour; the rareness of the systemic approach including every behaviour (generation, sorting, disposal) in a same model; an absence of the behavioural interdependence mechanisms among generation and sorting/disposal behaviours; a very poor consideration of waste volume that challenge the modelling of the interdependence between behaviours and technical infrastructure, or behaviours and governance; the very small number of models implementing a feedback loop essential for understanding how behavioural changes trigger infrastructure responses and vice versa. They are all avenues for research in ABM for a systemic approach informing on the quantity and the quality of the various collected flows. Complementary issues related to helping governance are identified, and concern the static properties of the population that do not change in size and location, the absence of study of an adaptive governance (policies and technical infrastructure), and the strong bias in favour of economic interventions against environmental incentives.
Hdaifeh et al. (Mon,) studied this question.