| Summary: | Planning gritting services is a large-scale task that involves a significant number of physical and
economic resources. During extreme cold weather conditions, roads become slippery and with it, the
number of accidents increase. While gritting services prevent accidents and increases safety
conditions, without them costs of accidents and delays would be enormous. For planning gritting
services, many considerations must be included such as the capacity of gritters and the sequence in
which a highway is going to be gritted. In this study, heuristic models were created in order to obtain
the optimal sector partition, the routing plans and the calculations for the total distance travelled to
grit a given area in two conditions: when turning is possible everywhere and when turning is restricted
to turning nodes. In both conditions, scenarios without the use and with the use of intermediate
facilities were considered. The complexity of the analysed scenarios gradually increases, starting by
simple configurations with just one facility as the replenishment point and ending with multiple
facilities configurations where turning is limited. This study does not consider costs and time-limitation
variables as constraints for developing the heuristic model.
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