Abstract
As the number and severity of snowfall events continue to grow, the need to direct road maintenance intelligently during these snowfall events will also grow. In several locations, local governments lack the resources to treat all roadways completely during snow events. Furthermore, some governments utilize only traffic data to determine which roads should be treated. As a result, many schools, businesses, and government offices must be unnecessarily closed, which directly impacts the social, educational, and economic well-being of citizens and institutions. In this work, we propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation to allocate resources to manage snowfall on roads using meteorological, geographical, and environmental parameters. Given that MIPs often scale poorly with problem size, we also present a constructive heuristic designed for the problem. Additionally, we evaluate the impacts of an increase in budget for winter road maintenance on snow control resources.
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Research sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managed by UT-Battelle, LLC, for the US Department of Energy. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy. The US Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
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Rodriguez, T.K., Omitaomu, O.A. & Ostrowski, J.A. Allocating limited deicing resources in winter snow events. J Veh Routing Algorithms 2, 75–88 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41604-019-00015-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41604-019-00015-4