A Data-Driven Risk-Informed Decision Support Framework for Sustainable Municipal Organic Waste Management in Smart Cities

Abstract

The rapid growth of organic waste volumes in urban areas and increasing environmental pressures necessitate the transition toward sustainable and risk-informed municipal waste management systems. This study aims to develop a data-driven decision support framework for the risk-informed management of municipal organic waste within the context of sustainable urban development. The proposed approach integrates multi-source municipal data, advanced preprocessing techniques, entropy-based feature weighting, and an ensemble of machine learning models, including Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and XGBoost. An integrated environmental risk index is formulated to quantify the state of the waste management system and to support predictive analytics. The results demonstrate high predictive performance and reveal that key risk drivers include demographic pressure, transport accessibility, infrastructure characteristics, and seasonal variability of waste generation. The developed framework enables the integration of predictive risk analytics into municipal decision support systems, facilitating optimized waste collection logistics, infrastructure planning, and early identification of critical conditions. The findings confirm that data-driven approaches can significantly enhance the efficiency and adaptability of urban waste management systems. The proposed framework contributes to sustainable urban development by supporting circular economy principles and enabling proactive, risk-aware governance of municipal organic waste systems.