An Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search Heuristic for a Snow Plowing Problem with Synchronized Routes

Abstract

A synchronized arc routing problem (SyARP) for snow plowing operations is introduced. Given a network of streets and a fleet of snow plowing vehicles, the SyARP consists of determining a set of routes such that all streets, some of which have multiple lanes, are plowed by using synchronized vehicles, and the ending time of the longest route is minimized. A mathematical formulation and an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic are proposed. The performance of the proposed solution procedure is evaluated over a large set of instances. Computational results reveal that the proposed procedure yields good quality feasible solutions.