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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Corberán, Ángel, Plana, Isaac, Reula, Miguel, Sanchís Llopis, José María|||0000-0002-0039-8122
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2021
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/184692
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/184692
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Routing
Distance constraints
Close-enough
Rural Postman
Branch and cut
MATEMATICA APLICADA
Descripción
Sumario:[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 of this problem to the case in which a fleet of vehicles is available. This problem, the Distance-Constrained Close Enough Arc Routing Problem, consists of finding a set of routes with minimum total cost such that their length does not exceed a maximum distance. In this article, we propose a new formulation for the Distance-Constrained Close Enough Arc Routing Problem and present some families of valid inequalities that we use in a branch-and-cut algorithm for its solution. Extensive computational experiments have been performed on a set of benchmark instances and the results are compared with those obtained with other heuristic and exact methods.