Abstract
The generalized directed rural postman problem is an arc routing problem with many interesting real-life applications, such as routing for meter reading. In this application, a vehicle with a receiver travels through a series of neighborhoods. If the vehicle gets closer than a certain distance to a meter, the receiver is able to record the gas, water, or electricity consumption. Therefore, the vehicle does not need to traverse every street, but only a few, to get close enough to each meter. We study an extension of this problem in which a fleet of vehicles is available. Given the characteristics of the mentioned application, the vehicles have no capacities but there is a maximum distance (or time) constraint all of them have to satisfy. We introduce four formulations for this problem, propose some families of valid inequalities, and present four branch-and-cut algorithms for its solution. The formulations and the algorithms are compared on a large set of instances.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (project MTM2012-36163-C06-02) and the Generalitat Valenciana (project GVPROMETEO2013-049) for their support.
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Ávila, T., Corberán, Á., Plana, I. et al. Formulations and exact algorithms for the distance-constrained generalized directed rural postman problem. EURO J Comput Optim 5, 339–365 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13675-015-0053-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13675-015-0053-8
Keywords
- Distance constrained
- Multivehicle
- Generalized directed rural postman problem
- Close-enough arc routing problem
- Branch-and-cut