Application Framework for Snow Removal Routing Problem

Road maintenance during the heavy snowfall is an important problem. In Sweden the government and municipalities together spend close to 0.3 thousand million SEK every year for winter road maintenance. Approximately half of it is snow removal cost, which in turn to a large extent depends on the routing of the snow-ploughing vehicles. In this thesis work, we wish to develop an application framework for optimized routing operation for these vehicles so that the total operational cost can be reduced at a significant level. In general, there are different characteristics of snow ploughing depending on the routing procedure, one is done after the snowfall and the other is during the snowfall. In this thesis work, we are only interested to find the set of routing paths during the snowfall where duration of snowfall is unknown. We present a new way of generating an initial solution that deals with the real operational network. The optimization algorithm works upon this initial solution and try to reduce the number of periodic paths