OPTIMIZATION OF EQUIPMENT USE IN ROUTINE HIGHWAY MAINTENANCE.

An optimization procedure was developed for assigning equipment to routine highway maintenance activities so that total fuel consumption would be minimized. The procedure is based on a linear programming technique and determines the optimal assignment of equipment in terms of the number of equipment days of a particular type of equipment to be assigned to a specific maintenance activity. The program is capable of handling a large number of activity-equipment combinations and performs optimization of fuel use as long as some of the types of equipment considered are interchangeable. An application of the procedure using the actual equipment use data from a typical subdistrict in Indiana is presented to demonstrate an equipment assignment problem. The technique was found to be efficient, and it provided feasible results to use in establishing equipment assignment guidelines for fuel conservation.