IoT-enabled smart waste disposal system: a use case for the context management platform

In the last few decades, the world has been witnessing an enormous increase in the amount of produced garbage, causing multiple environmental challenges. A significant part of the garbage can be recycled. However, for achieving a high rate of recycling, it is vital to collect different types of recyclable materials separately. It is often a challenging task for citizens to identify the type of waste and find the right container for disposal, especially when disposal uncommon types of garbage. Aligned with this problem, in this paper, we propose an IoT-enabled waste disposal system, focusing on several novel features, which make the system different from the existing alternatives. The proposed system relies on the Context Management Platform (CMP), which provides Context-as-a-Service in a smart city environment. In this way, we illustrate how a CMP platform can connect IoT data sources to enable streamlined development of applications. The novelty of the proposed smart disposal system is in the simple user interface that automatically recognises the type of waste based on the image taken by a smartphone. Then, the application navigates the user to the closest available container, based on the real-time IoT data from waste containers and other related IoT entities. Creating such an application requires using several advanced features of a CMP platform, which we illustrate in this paper. Moreover, the proposed system provides a way to interact with a potentially available locking mechanism of the smart waste container lid to only allow authorised users to use the container.