A survey of models and algorithms for winter road maintenance. Part I: system design for spreading and plowing

Winter road maintenance operations involve a host of decision-making problems at the strategic, tactical, operational, and real-time levels. Those operations include spreading of chemicals and abrasives, snow plowing, loading snow into trucks, and hauling snow to disposal sites. As the first of a four-part survey, this paper reviews optimization models and solution algorithms for the design of winter road maintenance systems for spreading and plowing operations. System design problems for snow disposal operations are discussed in the second paper. The two last parts of the survey mainly address vehicle routing, depot location, and fleet sizing models for winter road maintenance. The present paper surveys research on determining the level of service policy and partitioning a region or road network into sectors for spreading and plowing operations. We also describe the applied setting in which these problems arise.