Efficient Routing of Snow Removal Vehicles

The routing of vehicles is an important area in the field of transportation and logistics. Efficient routing of vehicles can save the transportation industry millions of dollars every year. This book addresses the problem of finding a minimum cost set of routes for vehicles in a road network subject to some constraints. Extensions, such as multiple service requirements, and mixed networks have been considered. Variations of this problem exist in many practical applications such as snow removal, refuse collection, mail delivery, etc. An algorithm was developed based on the GRASP heuristic to develop good quality solutions and a simulated annealing heuristic was developed to improve the solutions obtained from the construction heuristic. The heuristic developed in this study improved the best- known solution found by other authors on several of the tested instances obtained from the literature. The results obtained prove that the heuristic can be applied and adapted to practical problems having operational constraints such as one-way streets, restricted junctions, different costs for servicing, and traveling without servicing.