A case study of snow plow routing using an adaptive large hood search metaheuristic

Abstract

Snow plow routing is related to the rural post-man problem. Different constraints can be considered according to the site and the authority in charge. This paper considers the workload balance, partial area coverage, heterogeneous vehicles, road/vehicle dependences, the network hierarchy, and turn restrictions. It also introduces a network based on a case study conducted in a city in the province of Quebec, Canada. This is the first time that a network with both urban and rural characteristics has been solved. This work also innovates by using an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) metaheuristic on a large network (1924 road segments) while considering all the constraints above. The algorithm was used to design new routes for the city and to measure the impact of having fewer vehicles.

Keywords:

• Winter maintenance
• Snow plowing
• Rural post-man problem
• ALNS metaheuristic

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the FQRNT fund of the Quebec Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology, and Transport Quebec.