Heuristics for the periodic capacitated arc routing problem

Abstract : The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) involves the routing of vehicles to service a set of arcs in a network. This NP-hard problem is extended to a multiperiod horizon, giving a new tactical problem called the Periodic CARP (PCARP). This problem actually occurs in municipal waste collection. Its objective is to assign arcs to periods and to compute the trips in each period, to minimize an overall cost on the horizon. An integer linear program, two insertion heuristics and a two-phase heuristic are developed. These very first algorithms for the PCARP are evaluated on PCARP instances derived from standard CARP benchmarks from literature: the insertion heuristics are very fast but the two-phase method yields better solution costs.