Optimization of the Real-Time Response to Roadside Incidents through Heuristic and Linear Programming

Abstract

This paper presents a solution for a real-world roadside assistance problem. Roadside incidents can happen at any time. Depending on the type of incident, a specific resource from the roadside assistance company can be sent on site. The problem of allocating resources to these road-side incidents can be stated as a multi-objective function and a large set of constraints, including priorities and preferences, resource capacities and skills, calendars, and extra hours. The request from the client is to a have real-time response and to attempt to use only open source tools. The optimization objectives to consider are the minimization of the operational costs and the minimization of the time to arrive to each incident. In this work, an innovative approach to near-optimally solving this problem in real-time is proposed, combining a heuristic approach and linear programming. The results show the great potential of this approach: operational costs were reduced by 19%, the use of external providers was reduced to half, and the productivity of the resources owned by the client was significantly increased.

GIS-Based Simulated Annealing Algorithm for the Optimum Location of Fire Stations in the Madrid Region, Spain: Monitoring the Collapse Index

“…They avoided fixing a specific value for each territory depending on its characteristics. Assigning a threshold to the CI was quite challenging, since this value depends on the number of FS and vehicles, number of incidents per year, and the population of the regions, so it was established by analysing the frequency of the CI calculated for each incident and by consulting experts from the firefighting service [33]. The results of the optimisation process showed that the optimal locations of one to five FS increased the efficiency of the system.…”

“…Buil et al presented a study applying both linear programming and simulated annealing to determine the optimal allocation of resources to incidents in real time in a roadside assistance problem that minimised operating costs while maintaining the level of service above a certain threshold. These authors introduced a constraint similar to the one presented in this paper [33].…”

Multi-objective modelling of a roadside mowing problem: a case study in France

“…However, it is worthy to note that there is poor literature on this field. Most of the optimisation fields related to the road management and maintenance problem are waste allocation problems [7]- [11], human resource allocation [12], allocating resources [13], [16], highway maintenance [14], [15], winter road maintenance [17], pavement and bridge maintenance [18]. TABLE 1 presents a summary of these most recent works.…”