Improving Snowplowing Operations in Utah Through Optimization and Visualization

This paper describes efforts to improve snowplowing routes in 12 regions in northern Utah. Both exact and approximate methods are applied to determine snowplowing routes that decrease total travel time, turnaround time, and deadhead miles by an average of 5.04%, 15.01%, and 14.84%, respectively, across the 12 regions, which can significantly improve the efficiency of snow removal operations as well as the social welfare. Our models also evaluate the tradeoffs between different operational policies such as echelon versus nonechelon routing and centralized versus decentralized optimization and analyze various scenarios to understand the benefits of providing additional resources to different regions. These analyses enable local management teams to determine the best settings for their regions. In addition to optimization modeling, a major component of this work is the use of data visualization to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new routes (with comparisons to current practice) to the Utah Department of Transportation.

History: This paper was refereed.

Funding: This work was supported by the Mountain-Plains Consortium [Grant 637], the National Science Foundation [Grant CMMI-2112758], and the Utah Department of Transportation [Grant 218138].

Supplemental Material: The Online Appendix and videos are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.2023.0038.