Allocating limited deicing resources in winter snow events

Abstract

As the number and severity of snowfall events continue to grow, the need to direct road maintenance intelligently during these snowfall events will also grow. In several locations, local governments lack the resources to treat all roadways completely during snow events. Furthermore, some governments utilize only traffic data to determine which roads should be treated. As a result, many schools, businesses, and government offices must be unnecessarily closed, which directly impacts the social, educational, and economic well-being of citizens and institutions. In this work, we propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation to allocate resources to manage snowfall on roads using meteorological, geographical, and environmental parameters. Given that MIPs often scale poorly with problem size, we also present a constructive heuristic designed for the problem. Additionally, we evaluate the impacts of an increase in budget for winter road maintenance on snow control resources.