0000000000306473

AUTHOR

Miguel Reula

On the Distance-Constrained Close Enough Arc Routing Problem

[EN] Arc routing problems consist basically of finding one or several routes traversing a given set of arcs and/or edges that must be serviced. The Close-Enough Arc Routing Problem, or Generalized Directed Rural Postman Problem, does not assume that customers are located at specific arcs, but can be serviced by traversing any arc of a given subset. Real-life applications include routing for meter reading, in which a vehicle equipped with a receiver travels a street network. If the vehicle gets within a certain distance of a meter, the receiver collects its data. Therefore, only a few streets which are close enough to the meters need to be traversed. In this paper we study the generalization…

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The min-max close-enough arc routing problem

Abstract Here we introduce the Min-Max Close-Enough Arc Routing Problem, where a fleet of vehicles must serve a set of customers while trying to balance the length of the routes. The vehicles do not need to visit the customers, since they can serve them from a distance by traversing arcs that are “close enough” to the customers. We present two formulations of the problem and propose a branch-and-cut and a branch-and-price algorithm based on the respective formulations. A heuristic algorithm used to provide good upper bounds to the exact procedures is also presented. Extensive computational experiments to compare the performance of the algorithms are carried out.

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