HiCARE: Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm for Road Service Routing Enhancement

The potholes in the road cause substantial monetary and physical damage to the ongoing traffic. Also, it requires extensive maintenance, especially in areas where the temperature may go down below freezing point. One of the major causes of potholes is the rain or running water that is accumulated in the cracks and later on due to low temperature, changes into ice. Then, ice forms a larger volume for the same amount of water after expanding and causes cracks to expand and at some point become a pothole. They are also the cause of traffic congestion. Therefore, pothole repair needs urgent attention and is one of the routine road maintenance tasks. Kansas City is one of the cities with established social data networks for residents to request road services to mitigate the problem. Although the policymakers have not ignored the issue and rudimentary patching policies are in place, unfortunately, that does not provide efficient road maintenance routes. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm for Road Service Routing Enhancement (HiCARE). HiCARE is a practical framework, that makes use of open data in order to optimize the route for maintenance. The optimization considers the time and date of reported potholes, locations, traffic situations, weather conditions, type of patch or other repairs needed, and crew availability, to mention some. This research has characterized spatiotemporal pothole density by analyzing the past 16 years of pothole data from the Open Data KC 311 in Kansas City. HiCARE enhances the NP-hard Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) by classifying potholes into layers of clusters. HiCARE finds a cluster’s shortest possible pothole route by identifying each cluster group’s entrance and exit pothole points. Moreover, it modifies the final routes to skip any local minima. The empirical research and analysis indicate that HiCARE significantly reduces the traversing distance and is faster in computation time when compared to typical TSP heuristic algorithms for daily resolution scheduling.