Network Routing of Snowplow Trucks with Resource Replenishment and Plowing Priorities

The routing of snowplow trucks in urban and regional areas encompasses a variety of complex decisions, especially for jurisdictions with heavy snowfall. The main activities involve dispatching a fleet of snowplow trucks from a central depot or satellite facility to clean and spread salt and chemicals on the network links (i.e., snow routes). In this paper, a mixed integer linear program model is proposed to minimize the total operation time of all snowplow trucks needed to complete a given set of snow routes with multiple plowing priorities and to reduce the longest individual truck operation time. Customized construction and local search solution algorithms are developed and used to design snow routes for an empirical application. The computational results show that the proposed solution approach is able to solve the problem effectively and the model result outperforms the current solution in practice. The proposed models and algorithms are also incorporated into the development of a state-of-the-art snowplow routing software that can help planners optimize snow routes and evaluate options for resource allocation.