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G-2006-34

The Sector Design and Assignment Problem for Snow Disposal Operations

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BibTeX reference

Winter road maintenance operations involve a host of decision-making problems at the strategic, tactical, operational, and real-time levels. Those operations include spreading of chemicals and abrasives, snow plowing, loading snow into trucks, and hauling snow to disposal sites. In this paper, we present a model and two heuristic solution approaches based on mathematical optimization for the strategic problem of partitioning a road network into sectors and allocating sectors to snow disposal sites for snow disposal operations. Given a road network and a set of planned disposal sites, the combined problem is to determine a set of non-overlapping subnetworks, called sectors, according to several criteria related to the operational effectiveness and the geographical layout, and to assign each sector to a single snow disposal site so as to respect the capacities of the disposal sites, while minimizing relevant variable and fixed costs. Traditionally, these two closely intertwined problems are treated separately: sector design plans are developed first, followed by snow disposal assignments that specify the disposal site to which the snow in each planned sector is transported to by truck. In this paper, it is shown that a more integrated approach may be more efficient.

, 28 pages

Publication

The sector design and assignment problem for snow disposal operations
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European Journal of Operational Research, 189(2), 508–525, 2008 BibTeX reference