Decision Support System for Snow Emergency Vehicle Routing: Algorithms and Application

The results of research conducted to develop a decision support system for assisting the Maryland State Highway Administration Office of Maintenance staff in designing snow emergency routes for Calvert County are presented. The research deals with the problem of designing efficient routes for salting trucks in snow emergencies. The task is formulated for mathematical optimization and classified as a capacitated rural postman problem. The capacitated arc routing problem has been shown to be nonpolynomial hard. Several heuristic operations are described, and an algorithm that is a combination of these operations is proposed to solve the real-world snow emergency vehicle routing problems in Calvert County. The results of the implementations indicate that such a system may achieve improvements in service and savings in operational costs.