A matheuristic for the Distance-Constrained Close-Enough Arc Routing Problem

• Ángel Corberán ^[1] ; Isaac Plana ^[1] ; Miguel Reula ^[1] ; José M. Sanchis ^[2]
  1. [1] Universitat de València

     Universitat de València

     Valencia, España

     
  2. [2] Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

     Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

     Valencia, España

     
• Localización: Top, ISSN-e 1863-8279, ISSN 1134-5764, Vol. 27, Nº. 2, 2019, págs. 312-326
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • The Close-Enough Arc Routing Problem, also called Generalized Directed Rural Postman Problem, is an arc routing problem with 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 within a certain distance of 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, in order to be close enough to each meter. In this paper we deal with an extension of this problem, the Distance-Constrained Generalized Directed Rural Postman Problem or Distance-Constrained Close Enough Arc Routing Problem, in which a fleet of vehicles is available. The vehicles have to leave from and return to a common vertex, the depot, and the length of their routes must not exceed a maximum distance (or time). For solving this problem we propose a matheuristic that incorporates an effective exact procedure to optimize the routes obtained. Extensive computational experiments have been performed on a set of benchmark instances and the results are compared with those obtained with an exact procedure proposed in the literature.