The Snow Disposal Assignment Problem

Snow removal and disposal are expensive winter activities that affect the quality of life and the environment in cities throughout the world. To facilitate traffic flow in urban regions that receive heavy snowfall, snow is first ploughed from streets and sidewalks and then hauled to disposal sites. A city is typically divided into many sectors that are cleared of snow concurrently. This paper briefly describes urban snow removal and disposal operations and analyses the snow disposal assignment problem for assigning snow removal sectors to snow disposal sites. The snow disposal assignment problem is formulated as a multi-resource generalized assignment problem. A two-phase heuristic solution procedure is developed, and solutions and sensitivity analyses are presented using data for the City of Montreal.