A case study of combined winter road snow plowing and de-icer spreading

In this article, we address a winter maintenance problem where the streets need to be plowed and gritted in a sequence that depends on the class of the road. The maintenance fleet includes vehicles equipped for plowing, some for spreading, and some for both at once. The objective is to complete the operations as rapidly as possible while considering street hierarchy, turn restrictions, heterogeneous speeds, and street–vehicle compatibility. An adaptive large neighborhood search framework is developed to solve the problem. Analysis of the results obtained can provide both a good basis for vehicle routing and help managers plan long-term policies and investments.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author