Snowplow Routing Optimization Under Resource Constraints: Formulation, Algorithm, and Decision-Support System

Snow control is a key component of the winter maintenance responsibilities of many urban and regional agencies, especially in jurisdictions with heavy snowfall. Main activities involve routing snow plow trucks to plow roadways and spreading salt/chemicals via these trucks. In this paper, a mixed integer linear program (MILP) model is proposed to minimize the total operation time of all snow plow trucks needed to complete a given set of snow routes, and to reduce the longest individual truck time. To solve this problem, a set of customized construction and local search methods are developed and applied to an empirical case study. The computational results show that the proposed solution approach is able to solve the problem efficiently. The proposed models and algorithms are incorporated into the development of a state-of-art snow plow routing software that helps planners optimize snow routes and evaluate resource allocation options.