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Vehicle Routing for Urban Snow Plowing Operations

Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering and GERAD, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3A7
Department of Mathematics and Industrial Engineering and GERAD, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3A7
Department of Industrial Engineering and PYLO, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
nathalie.perrier{at}polymtl.ca
andre.langevin{at}polymtl.ca
ca.amaya{at}uniandes.edu.co

Winter road maintenance planning involves a variety of decisions related to the routing of vehicles for spreading chemicals and abrasives, plowing roadways and sidewalks, loading snow into trucks, and transporting snow to disposal sites. In this paper, we present a model and two heuristic solution approaches based on mathematical optimization for the routing of vehicles for snow plowing operations in urban areas. Given a district and a single depot where a number of plows are based, the problem is to determine a set of routes, each performed by a single vehicle that starts and ends at the district's depot, such that all road segments are serviced while satisfying a set of operational constraints and minimizing a time objective. The formulation models general precedence relation constraints with no assumption on class connectivity, different service and deadhead speed possibilities, separate pass requirements for multilane road segments, class upgrading possibilities, and vehicle road segment dependencies. Several extensions, such as turn restrictions, load balancing constraints, and tandem service requirements, which are required in a real-life application, are also discussed. Two objectives are considered: A hierarchical objective and a makespan objective. The resulting model is based on a multicommodity network flow structure to impose the connectivity of the route performed by each vehicle. The two solution strategies were tested on data from the City of Dieppe, New Brunswick, Canada.

Key Words: winter road maintenance; snow removal; arc routing; Chinese postman problem
History: Received: April 2006; revised: October 2006; accepted: February 2007.