Optimization of Snowplow Routes for Real-World Conditions

Abdullah, Rohani; Seo, Jaho; Xu, Shuoyan; Kwon, Tae J.; MacLean, Justin; Brown, Cody

doi:10.3390/su142013130

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Snowplow routes considering real-world constraints such as minimum maintenance standards and unsafe turning penalties is studied in [37]. Minimum maintenance standards is the allowed service time limit that municipalities in Ontario, Canada, set to different road classes.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimization of Snow Removal in Cities

Hajizadeh

2023

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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Removing snow in a city is an unavoidable task in Nordic countries like Sweden. A number of streets in an area need to be cleared of snow by a limited number of vehicles and the tours for the vehicles must be planned in order to minimize the time and/or cost. Since the amount of snow can vary significantly from one year to another, the plans/tours of one year cannot be used for the next year. Hence, new tours need to be planned each time. Snow removal can be done in rural or urban areas and in addition during snowfall or after a snowfall. In this thesis, we study urban snow removal after a snowfall.There are different relevant specifics of the urban snow removal problem. For instance, there are different types of streets which need different numbers of sweeps in order to remove the snow. In addition, some tasks must be done before other tasks can be started. This leads to precedence constraints. Furthermore, each vehicle needs a certain time to switch from a task to another task. The problem can be formulated as a huge time-indexed mixed integer programming which often is not directly solvable in practice.The contributions of this thesis include the study of different relaxations and heuristics to find feasible solutions and improve the bounds on the optimal objective function values which are discussed in five papers. Paper I deals with single vehicle snow removal. A branch-and-dive heuristic based on branch-and-bound principles is given in order to improve the solutions and bounds. In Paper II, feasible solutions for the snow removal problem with a limited number of identical vehicles are obtained. First, the work is broken down into smaller parts, one for each vehicle. Based on the obtained allocation, a feasible tour for each single vehicle snow removal is obtained. Finally, combined solution approaches and coordination of the vehicles to find a feasible solution for the original problem are discussed.In order to improve the computational efficiency, one can take advantage of the tree structure, since modern real life city networks often contain parts that are trees. In Paper III, tree parts are studied and a tree elimination procedure is given for the snow removal problem, to be used before searching for optimal tours. Two variations encountered in practice for normal streets are compared in Paper IV. The first variant is doing a middle sweep before the two side sweeps and the second one is doing only side sweeps. Paper V studies the problem from modeling perspective. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming model and different relaxations of it are investigated. Finally, Lagrangian relaxation of the problem is studied in Paper VI. Different possibilities for Lagrangian relaxations are investigated and subgradient optimization is used to solve the Lagrangian dual.iii iv When I was 30 years old, I packed those 30 years in a 30 kg luggage and moved to Sweden to start a new journey with an ambiguous future. Although I had lots of ups and downs during this journey and my life in Sweden, I met so ...

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Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Turning penalties in snow removal problem have been studied in [36], [35] and [37]. Precedence of clearing a street to transportation on that street is studied in [8], precedence of different lanes and precedence of streets to sidewalks are discudded in [12], and precedence of street classes is studied in [30].…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimization of Snow Removal in Cities

Hajizadeh

2023

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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“…While these methods are easy-to-apply and very wide in different regions, they raise environmental concerns due to penetrating vegetation, soil, and groundwater [11,12]. Another passive approach is snow plowing but it is both time-and energy-consuming while causing additional physical damage to the roads [13,14]. Apart from the passive solutions, hydronic heated driveways (HHD) and electrically heated driveways (EHD) are active solutions to remove snow or prevent icing on the road surfaces by (i) placing pipes in which the hot fluid is circulated under the road surface (for HHD) [15] and (ii) locating electric heating cables under the road surface to heat up the road (for EHD) [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Numerical and Economic Analysis of Hydronic-Heated Anti-Icing Solutions on Underground Park Driveways

Kayacı

Kanbur

2023

Sustainability

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Snow and ice forming on the entrance and exit driveways of underground car parks of buildings brings serious difficulties and risks in safe parking for vehicles in winter. Even though traditional methods such as chemical salt and snow plowing reduce slippery conditions on driveways, they also result in infrastructure- and environment-related damages. Hydronic heating is an alternative way to prevent snow and ice forming; thereby, the hydronic heating driveway (HHD) is a promising technique for energy-efficient and environment-friendly solutions. This study presents a time-dependent three-dimensional numerical heat transfer model for HHD applications with realistic boundary conditions and meteorological data in the MATLAB environment. After developing the numerical heat transfer model, the model is applied to a case study in Istanbul, Turkey and followed by an economic comparison with the commercial electrically-heated driveways (EHD) method that is applied in two different ways; applying the electric cables in (i) whole driveway and (ii) only tire tracks. Different escalation rates in natural gas and electricity, hot fluid inlet temperature, air temperature, and the number of parallel pipes are the main parameters in the case study. Results show that the decrease in pipe spacing drops the investment cost term but it needs a higher supplied fluid temperature for anti-icing, and therefore the operating cost term increases. Among other cases was the number of parallel pipes, with 50 being the most economically feasible solution for all air temperatures ranging from 0 °C to −10 °C. The economic comparison shows that the EHD with only tire tracks has the minimum total cost as it significantly decreased both the operating and investment cost terms. In case of an anti-icing requirement on the whole road surface, the HHD system was found to be preferable to the EHD whole driveway scenario at air temperatures of 0 °C and −5 °C, while it is more beneficial only for the high electricity escalation rates at the ambient temperature of −10 °C.

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