Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 36 (2002) 183202

Sector design for snow removal and disposal in urban areas

A. Labellea, A. Langevina,*, J.F. Campbellb
a

!
! and Gerad, C.P. 6079, succ. Centre-ville, Montreal,
! Que.,
! Canada H3C 3A7
Ecole
Polytechnique de Montreal
b
School of Business Administration, University of Missouri - St. Louis, 8001 Natural Bridge Road,
St. Louis, MO 63121-4499, USA
Received 1 November 1999; received in revised form 1 July 2001

Abstract
Snow removal and disposal are important and expensive winter operations in many cities. When a large
amount of snow accumulates in an urban area and impedes trac, the snow must be removed to snow
disposal sites. This paper rst briey describes snow disposal operations in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It
then presents models and ecient algorithms for partitioning a city into sectors for snow disposal
operations, and for assigning the sectors to disposal sites. These algorithms are incorporated in a
decision support system (DSS) built on a geographic information system. The DSS provides initial
solutions, and allows the planner to interactively design sectors to incorporate dicult constraints. Results
and some sensitivity analyses are presented for the City of Montreal.
r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Snow has important economic, environmental, social and political impacts on the inhabitants
of large northern cities [1,2]. For each signicant snowfall, public works agencies must readily
proceed to spread abrasives and/or de-icers on streets and sidewalks, and to plow the snow aside.
However, when the temperature remains below freezing for long periods, snow plowed to the sides
of streets accumulates and impedes circulation of pedestrians and vehicles. In this case, the snow
must be removed from the roadways and sidewalks to maintain mobility. This is usually
accomplished by loading snow into trucks, and hauling it away to disposal sites. Snow disposal
can also be required in cities with less wintry climates that experience infrequent, but large
snowfalls, such as was the case in Washington DC for the Blizzard of 96. This major storm
*Corresponding author. Fax: +1-514-340-4463.
E-mail address: andrel@crt.umontreal.ca (A. Langevin).
0038-0121/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 0 3 8 - 0 1 2 1 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 2 4 - 6

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closed the United States federal government oces for several days until the snow could be
removed and mobility regained. Snow removal and disposal can be an extensive and expensive
operation for large municipalities. For example, in an average winter in Montreal, Quebec,
Canada, more than 7 million cubic meters of snow in 300,000 truckloads are hauled to disposal
sites.
For ecient administration and operations, a large city is usually partitioned into sectors for
snow removal, and the removal activities are carried out simultaneously in every sector. A sector
may consist of 2040 km of streets that are cleared by a specic crew. Each sector is assigned to a
single disposal site to which all snow from the sector is hauled. The sector design problem
addressed in this paper involves partitioning an urban area into sectors, and assigning the sectors
to disposal sites in order to optimize snow removal and disposal. The problems and costs involved
in spreading de-icers and abrasives, or in snow plowing, are not considered here. Our focus is on
the snow removal and disposal activities that occur after spreading and plowing. We have two
goals: rst, to develop an ecient solution method; second, to imbed the method into a decision
support system (DSS) utilizing a geographical information system (GIS) to allow the planner to
interactively design the sectors. The remainder of this section describes snow removal and disposal
activities in Montreal.

1.1. Snow removal and disposal operations

With an area of 187 km2 and more than one million inhabitants, Montreal is the largest city in
the Province of Quebec. The average annual snowfall exceeds 200 cm and there are 2000 km of
streets and 3200 km of sidewalks to clear of snow. The annual budget for snow removal and
disposal is in excess of 60 million Canadian dollars (note that all money values in this article are in
Canadian dollars).
Snow plowing begins as soon as the accumulation of snow and ice reaches 2.5 cm. Plows push
the snow to the sides of the roadways and sidewalks to facilitate trac ow. Once the snow has
stopped falling, a decision is made whether or not to haul it to disposal sites, depending on the
accumulation and weather forecast. Snow disposal operations begin by plowing the snow back
toward the center of the street to form a long windrow, which is then loaded into trucks by a
snowblower. All the snow removed from each sector is sent to the same disposal site, for
managerial and contractual reasons. Snow disposal operations are subject to a time limit that
depends on the total accumulation and the size of the sector. For example, a sector of o25 km of
streets must be cleared within 72 h for a snow accumulation of o20 cm, within 84 h for an
accumulation of 2025 cm, and within 96 h for more than 30 cm of snow.
Based on the deadlines for removing snow, and the size of the street network in Montreal, the
city is divided into approximately 60 sectors. A separate crew of personnel and equipment for
loading snow (plows and snowblowers) and hauling snow (trucks) is assigned to each sector.
There are 20 disposal sites of four types: surface sites, sewer sites, river sites, and a large quarry.
The disposal costs vary from site to site according to the equipment used and labor force
operating a site. The amount of snow sent to each disposal site is subject to a maximum hourly
rate due to constraints on unloading trucks, while the surface sites and quarry are subject to
annual limits due to physical capacity.

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A brief review of literature is presented in the next section. In Section 3, the problem is
formulated and decomposed into two components for which separate solution methods are
developed. Section 4 presents a DSS that integrates the methods in a user-friendly environment
based on a GIS. Section 4 also describes the data required for the DSS. A complete design of
sectors for Montreal is presented in Section 5, along with several sensitivity analyses. The
conclusion follows.

2. Literature review
Management science has long played an important role in improving operations in a variety of
urban public service systems [36]. Some research has addressed a variety of problems involved in
snow removal and disposal for North American cities, and [7,8] review much of the relevant
literature. Routing snow plows and trucks spreading de-icers and abrasives has received the most
attention because these operations are common to snow ghting in all urban and rural regions.
Routing problems for spreading and plowing are practical examples of the Chinese Postman
Problem and related arc routing problems [920]. These problems are similar to other arc routing
problems such as garbage collection and street sweeping (e.g., see [2124]).
Interestingly, snow disposal operations have received very little attention. Two fundamental
problems in this scenario involve assigning sectors to disposal sites, and partitioning an urban
region into sectors. Leclerc [25,26] was the rst to study the problem of assigning sectors for snow
removal and disposal to snow disposal sites. It was modeled as a Transportation Problem where
the assignment of snow from a given sector was not restricted to a single site. Campbell and
Langevin [27] modeled the assignment problem as a multi-resource generalized assignment
problem. Due to the computational burden of solving large-scale instances, they proposed a
heuristic method that combines a penalty-based construction algorithm followed by a 2-opt
exchange improvement procedure. Reinert et al. [28] considered a related problem and presented
an integer programming model to simultaneously determine locations for salt and sand storage
facilities, and to assign specied vehicle routes to these facilities.
The design of sectors for snow removal and disposal has not previously been addressed in the
literature. There is considerable research, however, on other public sector districting problems,
such as those involving school districts (e.g. [2932]), and political districts (see [33,34] for
overviews). Criteria for districting often include demographic, political and, of course, geographic
factors. Heuristics have generally been employed for districting to capture political and legal
conditions, as well as to address the demographic issues especially important in school and
political districting. The development of geographic information systems (GIS) has facilitated
redistricting work by simplifying the visual display of what is inherently a spatial problem (see, for
example, [35,36]).

3. Problem formulation
The result of the sector design process for snow removal and disposal is a set of sectors, each of
which is assigned to a disposal site. This requires solving a districting problem to dene the

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boundaries of each sector (by partitioning a geographic region into non-overlapping

subregions), and solving an assignment problem to determine which disposal site receives the
snow from each sector. Because the shape and size of a sector may inuence its assignment, and
vice versa, the districting and assignment problems are interdependent. These decisions are also
subject to several geographical, economic, and political constraints that are generally dicult to
model.
The costs that aect the sector design procedure include operational (or variable) costs that
depend on the quantity of snow and/or the distance snow must be hauled, and xed costs for
equipment. Relevant operational costs account for hauling snow from sectors to disposal sites,
and for operating snow disposal sites. These costs depend on the assignment of sectors to disposal
sites, but not directly on the shape of a sector. Operational costs for loading trucks do not depend
on the size and shape of the sectors, since all snow must be loaded, so these costs are not
considered.
Relevant xed costs account for the number of trucks used to haul snow. Fixed costs to load
snow (i.e., for snowblowers in Montreal) are not included, because the number of snowblowers is
determined by the number of sectors, which is set by the level of service specied as deadlines for
clearing snow. In Montreal, the City provides trucks for hauling snow in some sectors, while
private contractors provide trucks in other sectors. There is no common xed cost per truck, and
the determination of the number of trucks required for each sector has previously been an ad hoc
procedure. Therefore, in this paper, we will seek to minimize the number of trucks required as a
proxy for minimizing the xed costs for trucks. The appropriate number of trucks to employ
depends on both the assignment of the sectors to disposal sites, and on the shape of the sector, as
will be described in Section 3.2.
A micro approach to sector design would use a single street segment as the unit of analysis.
However, this level of detail may lead to very slow response time in a DSS for a large city due to
the huge number of street segments in a large city (around 40,000 in Montreal). One tractable
approach is to dene the basic entities as geographic zones that contain a collection of neighboring
street segments. As zone size increases, both the number of zones and the computational eort
required for solution decreases, but so does the accuracy. Thus, the zone size captures the tradeo
between accuracy and response time of the DSS.
The snow disposal sector design problem can be solved by aggregating small geographic zones
into sectors, and assigning each sector to a snow disposal site (i.e., all the snow removed from a
given sector must be sent to the same disposal site). The zones are specied and, for each zone, the
length of streets is known, as is the annual volume of snow in cubic meters and the distance from
the farthest part of the zone to each disposal site. A set of disposal sites is specied, and each
disposal site has both an hourly and annual receiving capacity. The level of service provided is
specied in terms of the maximum sector size to ensure that every sector can be cleared within a
specied time. The number of snowblowers available is specied wherein each sector must contain
exactly one snow blower. The truck size in cubic meters and the average truck speed are also
known.
We dene the following decision variables:
xij 1 if zone i is assigned to sector j and 0 otherwise, and
yjk 1 if sector j is assigned to site k and 0 otherwise.

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We dene the following operational parameters:

dik =distance from zone i to site k (km),
li =length of streets in zone i (m),
vi =annual volume of snow in zone i (m3/yr),
rj =snow removal rate in sector j (m3/h),
Vk =annual capacity of site k (m3/yr),
Rk =maximum snow receiving rate of site k (m3/h),
M=maximum number of zones per sector,
tv =truck size (m3), and
ts =truck speed (km/h).
We dene the following cost parameters:
Cik =cost per cubic meter for hauling snow from zone i to site k ($/m3),
CVk =variable cost for disposal site k (e.g., cost for disposal) ($/m3), and
CT=xed cost for trucks ($/yr).
The annual volume of snow sent to site k in m3 is
XX
vi xij yjk :
i

The total cost per year for transporting snow to disposal sites can be approximated by
XXX
Cik vi xij yjk :
i

(The cost Cik for Montreal is described in Section 3.1.) The number of trucks used is


2dj max rj
NT
t;

ts
tv
where dj max is the maximum distance from a zone in sector j to its assigned disposal site:
dj max max fdik xij yjk g
i; k

and t is the number of additional trucks assigned to a sector. The rst ratio in NT is the time it
takes a truck to travel from the farthest zone in a sector to the disposal site and back. The second
ratio is the snow removal rate in trucks per hour. The product of these two ratios provides the
(possibly fractional) number of trucks that would be lled by a continuously operating
snowblower during the longest truck trip to and from the disposal site. The additional number of
trucks t helps to account for variability in the truck travel time. The formulation of NT is based on
not allowing the blower to become idle. If t 0; then the blower would be idle whenever the
actual travel time is greater than the average travel time to the farthest zone. Values of t greater
than zero allow the blower to stay busy when travel times exceed the average value.

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The total annual cost ($/yr) can be formulated as follows:

X
XX
XXX
Cik vi xij yjk
CVk
vi xij yjk
TC
j



X  2rj
CT
 max fdik xik yjk g t :
ts tv i; k
j
This objective includes three costs: the transportation cost for hauling snow from the sectors to
the disposal sites, the variable cost to operate the disposal sites, and the xed cost for the trucks.
The (non-linear) objective contains the product of the decision variables and a maximum
component in the last term.
The following constraints apply:
X
xij 1 for all zones i;
1
j

xij p

for all zones i and sectors j;

for all sectors j;

yjk

xij pM

XX
i

XX
i

vi xij yjk pVk

for all sites k;

ri xij yjk pRk

for all sites k;

each sector is a contiguous collection of zones; and

xij ; yjk Af0; 1g

for all i; j; k:

Constraints (1) assure that each zone is assigned to a sector. Constraints (2) link the zone and
sector assignments. They assure that if any zones are assigned to sector j; then sector j must be
assigned to some site. Note that sectors are not pre-dened and there may be sectors to which no
zones are assigned. (For example, if there are 300 user-dened zones and 80 sectors, the solution
may result in 20 sectors having no zones assigned to them i.e., 20 non-existent sectors.)
Constraints (3) limit the size of the sectors to a maximum of M zones. This is to ensure that the
specied level of service can be achieved in terms of the maximum time to clear the snow from a
sector. This could also be specied in terms of the length of streets in a sector as follows:
X
li xij pmaximum length of streets per sector for all sectors j:
i

Constraints (4) and (5) limit the assignment of sectors to disposal sites according to the annual
and hourly receiving capacity of the disposal sites. Constraints (6) are required to ensure that each
sector is composed of a contiguous set of zones, as discussed below. Integrality constraints (7)
prevent fractional assignments.
Contiguity constraints (6) are very dicult to write in an ecient or linear form [35]. However,
without these constraints a sector might consist of several disjoint collections of zones, which is

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189

undesirable from an administrative standpoint. This can also be operationally undesirable

because the snowblower would have unproductive travel (i.e., while not blowing snow to load
trucks) between the disjoint collection(s) of zones. Real-world districting problems are often
addressed with heuristic procedures, in which the contiguity condition is more easily handled by
sequentially aggregating adjacent zones to build districts, and also by improvement heuristics that
only consider changes in districts that maintain contiguity.
Given that an optimal integer programming solution is not feasible because of the nonlinearities in the objective function, and that there are diculties imposed by contiguity
conditions, a heuristic procedure is developed. The global problem of sector design is split into
two components to be solved sequentially: rst, we determine for each disposal site its area of
inuence as the streets or zones that are assigned to it; and second, partition the area of inuence
for each site into sectors. This heuristic of assign rst, partition second is analogous to a route
rst, cluster second approach for vehicle routing.
The objective for the assign phase is to minimize relevant operational costs; the objective for
the partition phase is to minimize the number of trucks for the given zone assignments.
Assigning zones to disposal sites in the rst step allows sectors to be dened in the second step
based on the known assignments. Alternative heuristic approaches that dene sectors
independently of their assignment to disposal sites are possible (such as a partition rst, assign
second, which rst aggregates zones into sectors, and then assigns sectors to disposal sites).
However, if sectors are created before the assignments to disposal sites are known, then the shape
of the sector may not reect the assignment. Because the shape of a sector depends on its
assignment (as shown below in Section 3.2), the aggregation of zones into sectors should occur
subsequent to (or simultaneous with) the assignment of streets to disposal sites. Section 3.1
presents the proposed heuristic for the assignment component. Section 3.2 addresses the
districting component.
3.1. Assignment of zones to disposal sites
The aim here is to assign each zone to a disposal site in order to minimize the cost of hauling
snow to disposal sites and for operating these sites, while satisfying capacity constraints at the
sites. The cost of hauling snow in a truck has been approximated by the city of Montreal as
Cik adik b;

where Cik is the transport cost per cubic meter of snow from zone i to site k ($/m3), and dik the
distance from zone i to site k (km), and a and b are parameters. In Montreal, a 0:1395 and
b 0:513: The values for these parameters can be determined for other cities by regression with a
suitable set of data. The costs of operating disposal sites are evaluated in dollars per cubic meter
of snow at a disposal site. These costs vary from site to site depending on the method, equipment
and manpower used.
Every disposal site has an hourly capacity constraint for unloading trucks. This depends on the
conguration of the disposal site, and the available equipment and manpower. For example, in
Montreal, the hourly unloading capacity of the sewer sites is limited by the small size of the
opening into the sewer system. In contrast, the quarry site has a very large hourly unloading
capacity because it is composed of multiple unloading stations around the perimeter of the quarry.

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Disposal sites may also have an annual capacity constraint due to the limited space available to
store snow. In Montreal, the surface and quarry sites have specied annual capacities.
The problem of assigning zones (or streets) to disposal sites can be formulated as a multiresource generalized assignment problem, which is NP-hard [7,37]. In such an integer linear
programming (ILP) formulation, there is a variable for each zone-disposal site combination. A
large city like Montreal might require approximately 400 zones and 20 disposal sites, which
produce 8000 variables. Because of the large size of this ILP formulation, optimal solution via
mathematical programming is impractical within an interactive DSS. We have therefore devised a
fast heuristic approach to provide timely solutions.
3.1.1. Heuristic approach
The heuristic method proposed here allows high quality solutions to be obtained in a short
time. It utilizes a heuristic called two-resource assignment problem (TRAP) which was developed
by Campbell and Langevin [7] to solve the problem of assigning snow removal sectors to disposal
sites. This algorithm was chosen for the quality of its solutions and its speed. It may be adapted in
a straightforward manner to the present problem of assigning zones (rather than sectors) to
disposal sites.
The heuristic has two components. Initially, zones are assigned to disposal sites based on a
penalty calculation. The penalty is the dierence between the cost of assigning a zone to the best
(lowest cost) disposal site and second best disposal site. Let f i be the lowest cost feasible disposal
site for zone i; likewise, let si be the second lowest cost feasible disposal site for zone i: The
penalty for zone i is then the dierence between the cost to assign i to si and the cost to assign it
to f i:
Penaltyi Ci; si  Ci; f i;
where Ci; k is the transportation and elimination cost for assigning zone i to site k:
The second part of the heuristic is a 2-opt exchange procedure that considers reassigning every
pair of zones to every pair of sites. Zones are reassigned whenever the total cost decreases and the
capacity constraints remain satised. The TRAP heuristic is presented in Table 1.
The proposed heuristic is eective for providing reasonable response times in an interactive
decision support environment. The heuristic was coded in C and the total time on a 266 MHz PC
to assign 390 zones to 20 disposal sites was approximately 13 s, including 1 s for the initial
assignment and 12 s for the 2-opt procedure. These solution times are very much lower than could
be obtained with an exact approach.
3.2. Districting to dene sectors
The assignment of zones to disposal sites (as explained in Section 3.1) denes each sites area of
inuence. Sectors can then be designed for each area of inuence by agglomerating neighboring
zones into sectors. The sectors should be of similar size or workload (for the snowblower) for
reasons of equity (i.e., operations should nish in all sectors at about the same time). Sector size is
limited by the specied service level, i.e., the requirement to complete removal of the snow within
a specic time interval (e.g., 72 h). The sector size limit can be expressed in terms of a limit on the
number of zones, the length of streets, or the annual amount of snow in each sector. Sector size

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191

Table 1
TRAP heuristic
A. Penalty-based assignment phase
1. Calculate the penalty for each zone i: penaltyi Ci; si2Ci; f i
2. Find the unassigned zone with the largest penalty, say i , and assign it to its best site f i
3. Update the set of feasible zones for site f i ; and update f i; si and penaltyi for all zones i for which
f i f i or si f i
4. Repeat steps 23 until no more zones can be assigned
5. Assign any unassigned zones to a dummy site at innite cost
B. Two-opt exchange
6. For each pair of zones i and j; with assigned sites sitei and sitej; try to reassign zones i and j to every other pair
of sites k and lkasitei; lasitej: Reassign the zones if the cost decreases and the assignment is feasible, i.e., the
hourly and annual capacities are satised
7. Repeat step 6 until no more zones can be reassigned

and service level could be determined by the amount of equipment available (e.g., snowblowers),
since each sector requires a snowblower and trucks. For logistical reasons, a sector should be a
contiguous set of zones, and not split by obstacles such as railroads, major highways, rivers, etc.
The objective then is to aggregate zones to form non-disjoint sectors of similar specied size to
minimize costs for snow disposal operations.
The major costs relevant to the sector design problem arise from the trucks used to transport
snow from sectors to disposal sites. The elimination costs for operating disposal sites and the
transportation costs for hauling snow to disposal sites are xed by the assignment of zones to
disposal sites. Snowblower operating costs (i.e., $ per cubic meter of snow removed multiplied by
the total quantity of snow) are determined by the total amount of snow needing disposal and do
not depend on the shape of a sector. In Montreal, private contractors provide snow-hauling
trucks in some sectors, and the City provides trucks for other sectors. Designing sectors to reduce
the number of trucks required reduces costs to the City, both directly for City serviced sectors and
indirectly through contract specications for privately serviced sectors.
The number of trucks required to serve a sector depends on the snow removal policy within the
sector, and the distance from the sector to its assigned disposal site. To minimize the time to
complete snow removal operations in a sector, snowblowers generally operate in a continuous
manner loading trucks. To have the snowblower idle while waiting for the arrival of an empty
truck to ll is to be avoided, both to minimize the time required to clear the streets and to
eliminate citizen complaints about non-working crews. Therefore, minimizing the number of
trucks while having the snowblowers run continuously guides the design of the sectors.
To allow continuous operation of snowblowers, there will typically be a queue of trucks moving
slowly down the street alongside the snowblower, and as soon as the rst truck is lled with snow,
the second truck takes its place to begin being lled. The rst truck departs for the disposal site,
dumps its load of snow and returns to the end of the queue alongside the snowblower in its
assigned sector. The number of trucks needed in a sector to allow continuous operation of the
snowblower depends then on the time to load and unload a truck, and on the travel time between
the snowblower and the disposal site.

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Because the loading and unloading times are independent of sector shape, we focus on the
travel time component. Travel time depends on the location of the truck when it departs from,
and returns to, the snowblower, relative to the assigned site. When the snowblower is far from the
disposal site, a truck must travel a long distance to and from the site. The number of trucks
assigned to the sector must therefore be large to ensure that an empty truck will always be
available to be lled. Conversely, when the snowblower is near its disposal site, only a small
number of trucks is needed. Thus, the number of trucks needed to ensure the snowblower is never
idle increases with distance from the disposal site. Because trucks are not allocated dynamically to
sectors, in practice, the number of trucks required in a sector depends on the maximum travel time
between a sector and its assigned disposal site. A more sophisticated operational strategy that
could dynamically re-deploy trucks between dierent sectors according to changing needs is left
for future research.
The cost for snow hauling trucks can thus be minimized by designing sectors to minimize the
sum of the maximum distances from sectors to disposal sites (under the assumption that
minimizing distance minimizes travel time). Consider a region to be partitioned into two sectors of
equal area. For one of the sectors, the maximum distance to the disposal site must equal the
maximum distance from the region to the disposal site. The objective then is to partition the
region to minimize the maximum distance to the other (closer) sector. For the Euclidean metric,
the region should be divided by a circular arc centered on the disposal site to create two sectors of
equal area. Similarly, to partition a region into more than two sectors, the dividing lines (i.e.,
sector boundaries) should be circular arcs centered on the disposal site. For a rectilinear metric,
the results are similar, but the partitions that dene sectors are lines of equal rectilinear distance
from the disposal site. These lines will be at a 451 angle relative to the directions of rectilinear
travel as shown in Fig. 1.
The design principle is the same for either metric: sectors should be elongated in a direction
perpendicular to the direction to the disposal site to reduce the number of trucks required. This is
the opposite of the general guideline for forming sectors for a vehicle routing problem, where the
sectors should be elongated towards the depot to reduce travel distance in each route.
A strict application of the sector design principle described above can lead to a variety of
problems. For example, when the region to be partitioned is not compact, then the resulting

Disposal site

Fig. 1. Sectors with the rectilinear metric.

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193

sectors may be disjoint. Another problem arises when there are many sectors to be created, or
when the region to be partitioned is elongated in the direction perpendicular to the direction to the
disposal site. Then, the resulting sectors may be very narrow, which would be impractical in view
of the street network. (In a very narrow sector, the snowblower route will be inecient because it
may include many very short street segments across the narrow width of the sector and thus
require numerous turns.) Also, for the rectilinear metric, if the region is too elongated in the
direction perpendicular to the direction to the disposal site, then partition lines may create
noncontiguous sectors, as shown in Fig. 2. However, in practice, snow disposal sectors can be
formed by aggregating adjacent zones, allowing the minimum zone size to help achieve practical
sectors. Thus, zones should not be too small or too narrow, or the resulting sectors could be
impractical.
Based on this analysis, the sector design procedure should ideally aggregate zones to produce
sectors of the appropriate elongated shape and orientation in order to minimize the total number
of trucks required. Unlike many other districting problems, extremely compact sectors are not
particularly desirable due to the increased number of trucks required. The appropriate shape of a
set of sectors is determined by the tradeo between the cost savings from reducing the number of
trucks needed in elongated sectors and the added cost for inecient operations if sectors are too
elongated. The size of zones (and, hence, the number of zones) plays an important role in the
shape of sectors.
The algorithm for aggregating zones into sectors considers each area of inuence separately.
For each such area, the distance between each zone and the disposal site is required. (Distance is
calculated using a shortest path algorithm on a subset of streets used by the trucks [38,39].) Also
required is the zone adjacency matrix whose element in row i and column j is equal to 1 if zones i
and j are adjacent, and to 0 otherwise. Sector size is constrained by the specied level of service,
which limits the maximum number of zones (or km of street) that can be combined into a sector.
The basic idea behind the sector aggregation algorithm is to combine two zones whose union
results in the greatest decrease in the sum of the maximum distances from the zones to the disposal
site. Thus, combining two zones produces a savings corresponding to the trip to the closer of
the two zones, which is somewhat analogous to the approach in the ClarkeWright savings
algorithm [40] for vehicle routing.
The rst step of our proposed algorithm consists of calculating the savings obtained by
combining two adjacent zones. Then, sectors are assembled by aggregating zones two at a time to
form larger zones, as long as the sector size constraint is satised. (The term zone is used here
to refer to the original set of geographic zones assigned to disposal sites, and to the agglomeration

B
A

Disposal site

Fig. 2. Multiple sectors in an elongated region.

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Table 2
Districting algorithm
1. For each pair of adjacent zones i and j; calculate the savings: savings: min fdik ; djk g where dik represents the distance
between the zone i centroid and site k
2. If a zone has only one adjacent zone and their union will not exceed the size limit, then join the two zones
Repeat while there are zones with only one neighbor
3. Join the two adjacent zones with largest value of savings whose union will not exceed the size limit
4. Repeat steps 13 until all zones belong to a sector

of several of these original zones.) The aggregation process begins with any zones that have only a
single adjacent zone. This reduces the number of small sectors that result from the aggregation
process. After all zones with a single adjacent zone are treated, aggregation continues by joining
the zone pair with the largest savings (that satisfy the sector size constraint). Each time two zones
are joined, the adjacency matrix is adjusted. Table 2 presents the districting algorithm to create
sectors.
The algorithm was programmed in C. The running times to create the sectors for areas of
inuence with up to 80 zones (in Montreal) were always under 1 s on a Pentium-266 MHz PC.
Most of the sectors obtained have the desired shape. Some sectors consisting of isolated zones
remained near the disposal site because zones with the smallest savings were treated last. The next
section describes how the two algorithms presented here were imbedded in a GIS to form a DSS.

4. Decision support system

The key objective of our project was to build a user-friendly interactive DSS for use by snow
disposal planners and managers. This DSS needed to combine the tools of operations research
with the graphical and analytical capabilities of a GIS. It was aimed at allowing the manager to
participate in the decision process of sector design. A GIS is software for maintenance, display
and analysis of geographic or spatial data. Geographical data such as disposal sites, streets, and
zones are represented by points, arcs (or line segments), and polygons. The GIS used in this
project is MapInfo [41]. MapInfo runs in Windows and provides powerful tools to work with
databases. It has a programming language, MapBasic, that enables development of tailored
applications. Subroutines can be written in any programming language.
The rst step in the solution procedure is the preparation of data. Solutions can then be
produced using the DSS that incorporates the heuristics described earlier. The remainder of this
section concentrates on data preparation.
The basic geographic data required for Montreal are the streets, disposal sites, and zones. To
each street segment is associated information such as geographical location, length, width, and
type (highway, boulevard, etc). For the disposal sites, the information required includes: location,
annual and hourly capacities, and elimination costs (see Table 3). These data were provided by the
City of Montreal. Fig. 3 shows the locations of the disposal sites.
The elimination cost represents the cost per cubic meter for operation of the disposal site. These
costs are relatively low for sewer sites, river sites and the quarry, where trucks dump snow directly,

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Table 3
Disposal site information
Site

Type

Anbar
Beauharnois
Brousseau
! e! e
De lEp
Dickson Nord
Iberville
Millen
Poincar!e
Sauv!e
St-Pierre

Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer
Sewer

Armand-Chaput
Contrecoeur
M.A. Fortin
Mont!ee St-L!eonard
Parc Newman
Royalmount

Elimination cost
($/m3)
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute
chute

Hourly capacity
(m3/h)

Annual capacity
(m3/yr)

0.16
0.38
0.25
0.48
0.25
0.29
0.17
0.38
0.32
0.22

700
400
1000
400
600
700
2000
700
600
2800

N
N
N
N
N
N
N
N
N
N

Surface
Surface
Surface
Surface
Surface
Surface

0.68
0.57
0.62
0.34
0.43
0.85

6000
4000
2000
2000
1000
2000

1,050,000
700,000
400,000
600,000
154,000
250,000

Pont de la Concorde
Quai #30
Quai #52

River
River
River

0.17
0.14
0.17

10,000
10,000
5000

N
N
N

Francon

Quarry

0.34

10,000

3,000,000

Quarry
River site
Sewer chute
Surface site

Fig. 3. Current disposal site locations.

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but somewhat higher for surface sites where the snow must be moved and formed into a large pile
after dumping. The hourly capacity of a site depends on its conguration, and the available
equipment and personnel for unloading. Most sewer sites have relatively low annual capacities
due to the limited size of the openings into the sewer system, and the requirement that the
temperature of the water not fall too low. The surface sites have moderate hourly capacities, while
the river and quarry sites have high hourly capacities due to multiple unloading stations. The
annual capacities of the surface and quarry sites are restricted by the physical space available for
storage of snow. The river and sewer chute sites have eectively unlimited space due to the action
of the water to remove the snow.
The City of Montreal estimates the hourly removal rate from sectors (m3/h) based on the
capabilities of snowblowers for lling trucks. The annual volume of snow in a sector (m3/yr) is
estimated based on the historical amount of snow per linear meter of street (m3 per linear meter of
street). Thus, the total length of streets in a sector determines the annual volume of snow
generated by the sector to be sent to a disposal site.
Zones must be dened based on the street data and city boundaries. They should be numerous
enough (i.e., small enough) that the change of assignment of a single zone would have only a
minor eect on the total cost. This also allows more exibility in assembling the zones into sectors.
The zones should also be large enough so that the sector aggregation procedure does not result in
impractical sectors. The City of Montreal was divided into 390 zones. Thus, to obtain
approximately 60 sectors (the number of sectors currently used by the City), each sector should
include approximately 6 zones. The number of zones (390) was based on consideration of local
road geometry, neighborhoods, infrastructure, etc. to provide a reasonable tradeo between
accuracy and computation time.
The zones were constructed with the help of the GIS. For each zone, a set of street segments was
selected by an individual familiar with the city and with the snow disposal operations. The GIS
automatically calculates the total length of streets selected. The GIS also facilitates construction
of balanced zones and zones not traversed by a natural barrier such as a river or a railroad. The
total annual amount of snow in each zone was calculated by the GIS based on the street data and
historical snowfall averages.
Once zones are created, the next step consists of determining zone centroids and calculating the
distances from the zone centroids to the sites. The centroid is dened as follows. Each segment of
street i of a zone is replaced by its center point Pi ; where the length of the segment constitutes the
weight of the point. The centroid X is that point minimizing the weighted sum of the distances
from X to the Pi :
X
wi dX;Pi ;
i

where Pi is the position of point i; wi the weight of point Pi ; X the position of centroid to be
determined, and dX;Pi the distance between the centroid and point Pi :
The transportation costs are then determined by Eq. (8). The distances between the zone
centroids and the disposal sites are calculated with a shortest path algorithm as described
in Labelle [39]. This algorithm was developed specically for the current type application, and
uses a reduced network of major roadways likely to be traveled by the heavy trucks hauling
snow. The total distance is the sum of an analytical approximation for travel to a node

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197

on the reduced network, and the shortest path on the reduced network. For details, see
[38,39].
The sector design algorithm requires a zone adjacency matrix, which can be easily automated
using the geographical tools of MapInfo. The zone adjacency matrix has a row and a column
corresponding to each zone. The entry for row j and column k is 1 if zone j is adjacent to zone
k; and 0 otherwise. The adjacency matrix can be manually modied to take into account
geographical and political constraints as desired. Other parameters can also be modied as desired
with a few clicks of the mouse.
Once the data are prepared, the TRAP heuristic in the DSS assigns the zones to the disposal
sites. The DSS automatically calculates the total cost and the residual capacity for each disposal
site. It is then possible to manually modify the assignments. A program allows the user to reassign
one or two zones at a time. All the costs and residual capacities are adjusted accordingly by the
DSS.
When satised with the assignment, the planner moves to the districting step. For each site, the
heuristic automatically partitions its region of inuence into sectors using the districting algorithm
presented earlier. Then, the sectors can be manually adjusted. This allows the planner to assign
any isolated zones to sectors and to explore any desired adjustments. Costs and capacities are
automatically updated. Manual adjustments continue until the planner is satised with the
resulting sectors, disposal site utilization, and costs. In the next section, we present a case study
based on data from the City of Montreal.

5. Case study
This section presents a complete solution obtained by the DSS system developed in this project
along with several sensitivity analyses using data for the City of Montreal. Fig. 4 presents the
assignment of zones to disposal sites obtained using the zone assignment heuristic TRAP [7]. The
transportation and elimination cost of this solution was $9,752,300, while the computing time on
a PC (Pentium-266 MHz) was 13 s.
The solution was then modied to make it more realistic. Fig. 5 presents the assignment of
zones to disposal sites following such manual modications. The circles in Figs. 4 and 5 indicate
the regions where zone assignments were modied. In Fig. 5, disposal sites denoted with an x
are not being used. Circle A in Fig. 4 shows a single isolated zone assigned to a small sewer chute
disposal site. Circle A in Fig. 5 shows how the single zone was incorporated into the neighboring
sector. The heuristic TRAP does not take into account the xed costs of the disposal sites. Hence,
it is possible that only one or two zones are assigned to a disposal site; such a situation should
generally be avoided in practice.
Circle B in Fig. 4 shows several zones in the lower portion of the circle that are assigned to a
surface disposal site near the top of the circle. Because travel between these zones and disposal site
would involve driving through other municipalities (in the empty gap across the center of the
circle), these zones were reassigned (see Fig. 5) to disposal sites that did not involve travel through
other municipalities. (Another way to handle such a problem would be to add a large travel time
on to the appropriate arcs or to remove such arcs within the GIS.) These manual adjustments
increased the cost by only 0.37% to $9,788,257, but also eliminated the use of a disposal site.

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Fig. 4. Assignment obtained with TRAP heuristic.

Fig. 5. Assignment after manual modications (sites not used indicated by an x).

The next step was to dene the sectors. For the case study we set the maximum number of
zones per sector to seven. The heuristic was applied to each area of inuence that contained
10 or more zones. Areas of inuence with nine or fewer zones were treated manually. The sector
design algorithm required approximately 1 s for each area of inuence. The designed sectors are
presented in Fig. 6. In general, the sectors have the desired shape relative to the assigned disposal
site. However, one sector is made up of a single isolated zone (depicted in black within rectangle C

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199

Fig. 6. Sector design.

of Fig. 6). Fig. 7 presents the sectors designed following manual modications. The sectors (in
rectangle C) surrounding the isolated zone have been reshaped to integrate it. Manual
modications may also be required to address selected geographic, political, and/or economic
concerns.
6. Sensitivity analyses
One of the main advantages of the DSS is its ability to quickly evaluate several alternative
scenarios. For example, transportation and elimination costs, or disposal site capacities could be
modied. Another interesting scenario is to vary the site capacities. For instance, one may explore
the impact of substantially reducing the quantity of snow dumped in the river for environmental
purposes. Table 4 presents the results of sequentially closing the three river disposal sites. These
sites have large capacities and are relatively inexpensive, so they are heavily used if available. The
results show that although the capacities of the other sites are sucient to take the snow formerly
sent to the river, the increase in cost can be substantial.
7. Conclusion
Snow removal and disposal are expensive and essential activities in cities subject to large
snowstorms. A key strategic planning problem is to divide a city into sectors for concurrent snow

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Fig. 7. Sectors after manual modications.

Table 4
Increase in costs when closing river sites

Original assignment
Closing Pont de la Concorde
Closing Pont de la Concorde & Quai 30
Closing Pont de la Concorde & Quai 30 & Quai 52

Cost ($)

Cost increase (%)

9,752,300
9,766,987
10,277,742
10,973,310

F
+0.15
+5.39
+12.52

removal and disposal operations. The objectives guiding sector design include the xed and
operational costs for trucks hauling snow, and the costs for operating disposal sites. This paper
presents a exible GIS-based decision support system for designing sectors for snow removal and
disposal. It allows the planner to incorporate a variety of dicult-to-quantify constraints. Such an
approach also provides the planner with a valuable tool for exploring and evaluating alternative
designs. The DSS was demonstrated with data from the City of Montreal.
In the current paper, the level of service in terms of the number of sectors was assumed as given.
One interesting use for our DSS is to explore alternative levels of service. For example, with fewer
but larger sectors, the time to complete snow removal would increase, but the costs for equipment
and manpower would decrease. These cost savings could be compared against the added
inconvenience and cost of the degraded mobility. Other issues for future research include the

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201

inuence of sector shape on snowblower routing, alternate aggregation schemes to create sectors,
the impacts of changing parameters (e.g., increasing hourly capacities at disposal sites by adding
more equipment or workers), opening new disposal sites, or closing existing ones. One important
concern is the environmental impact of dumping snow contaminated with urban pollutants into
water bodies [42]. Bodies of water adjoin most large cities, and often provide a relatively
inexpensive place for snow dumping. Closure of snow disposal sites along rivers and the lakes,
and the opening of new disposal sites can be evaluated eciently with the proposed DSS.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of
Canada and by the Fonds FCAR of the Quebec Ministry of Research, Science and Technology.
The authors would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, Barnett R. Parher, and two anonymous
referees for their valuable comments that led to this improved version of the article.

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