Theoretical and computational analysis of a new formulation for the Rural Postman Problem and the General Routing Problem

[EN] The Rural Postman Problem (RPP) is one of the most well-known problems in arc routing. Given an undirected graph, the RPP consists of finding a closed walk traversing and servicing a given subset of edges with minimum total cost. In the General Routing Problem (GRP), there is also a subset of v...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Corberán, Ángel, Plana, Isaac, Segura-Martínez, Paula, Sanchís Llopis, José María
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2024
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:10251/203288
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/203288
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Rural Postman Problem
General Routing Problem
Branch and cut
Facets
Polyhedron
MATEMATICA APLICADA
Descripción
Sumario:[EN] The Rural Postman Problem (RPP) is one of the most well-known problems in arc routing. Given an undirected graph, the RPP consists of finding a closed walk traversing and servicing a given subset of edges with minimum total cost. In the General Routing Problem (GRP), there is also a subset of vertices that must be visited. Both problems were introduced by Orloff and proved to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose a new formulation for the RPP and the GRP using two sets of binary variables representing the first and second traversal, respectively, of each edge. We present several families of valid inequalities that induce facets of the polyhedron of solutions under mild conditions. Using this formulation and these families of inequalities, we propose a branch-and-cut algorithm, test it on a large set of benchmark instances, and compare its performance against the exact procedure that, as far as we know, produced the best results. The results obtained show that the proposed formulation is useful for solving undirected RPP and GRP instances of very large size.