Optimizing a joint multi-operator planning to reduce deployment costs and urban hinder

摘要

Unavailable roads and sidewalks are common in any city, often linked to utility works, urgent repairs, periodic maintenance or installing new infrastructure. Independent of the cause of the utility work, hinder for the city environment is common due to closed roads and associated diversions, unreachable shops, or noise disturbance for people near the construction sites. Despite the fact this could lead to less hinder and also to noteworthy cost reductions, on only a limited number of locations do utility operators decide to collaborate, mainly due to little communication between the different utility operators. To address this issue, we introduce an abstract score-based model which can score a multi-utility planning for both single-actor as well as multi-actor parameters. This model aims to maximally respect the budget of each actor, while optimizing the levels of synergy between multiple actors. Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming, a new synergy-focused multi-utility planning can be generated. This planning model has been applied to real data, thereby showing the model can increase the amount of collaboration expressed as 'number of weeks in collaboration' up to a significant 94%. As this is a theoretical model for a practical problem, an extensive sensitivity analysis was performed to verify the impact of the different parameters at play. We have shown the model is able to generate major improvements under a large range of constraints. Although the results are promising, we do argue that this solution should not be considered a black box to optimize a multi-utility planning without further human intervention.