Model for Snow-fighting Vehicle Route Planning Considering Deadheading Restriction
Wei Zhou, Biao Wu · Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Computer Science and Application Engineering · 2018
Snow1 removal is an important job for urban traffic authority to keep urban traffic smooth and safe, particularly for cities in cold regions. Snow-fighting vehicle routing problem, for mechanically removing measure, is an arc routing problem. However, the deadheading problem, in which vehicles may travel on a road covered by snow without serving it, is unreasonable and increasing the cost. Therefore, an optimization model is constructed to restrict the deadheading problem, which allows deadheading only after the road has been serviced. Also, a two-stage serial algorithm, which is first-clustering-then-routing, is proposed to solve the optimization model. A numerical example is conducted subsequently. Results show that the efficiency of snow removal drops as demand rises and most of the snow is removed in the front of the whole time. Besides, three alternative objective functions are analyzed and the outcome indicates taking minimal makespan as the objective function is better in most instances.