A framework of winter road maintenance optimization

The road maintenance is a significant challenge for the northern cities. Each city usually spends large amount of capital on the operations of winter maintenance during winter. The paper mainly introduces the system components of winter maintenance of urban road and the decision-making levels of the maintenance operations, then discusses the optimization models of system design, snow disposal, and vehicle routing, at last, gives the framework of maintenance decision support system. In solving the optimization model, intelligent algorithms like tabu search algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization, and artificial neural network algorithm will play important role. Considering the neglect of winter maintenance optimization by government and local department, the object of the paper is to stimulate the research and the development of winter maintenance optimization through in China.