Overview and Possible Approach to Street Sweeping Criticalities

In order to highlight the complexity in planning street sweeping in urban areas, an example is given based on the collection of the number of passages of sweeping vehicles during an observation period of one year. Data refer to a district of a European city whose street sweeping service was kept under monitoring with the aid of a software tracking sweeping vehicles and other operational parameters. The monitoring campaign pointed out the issues occurring during sweeping operations and the available margins of improvements. Two methodologies for optimization were proposed: a theoretical-analytical approach based on the attribution of weights to street characteristics and a hybrid approach, initially based on a previous experience in an urban area and later refined with the continuous analysis of data collected during sweeping operations. The present article shows that the second approach is the easier to adopt and allows for a flexible calibration of sweeping operations.