Amongst the most important features of supply chain management are those related to interconnecting various companies within a supply network. While the performance of these interconnections is greatly influenced by information technology and information management we still face another important issue regarding logistics performance which is transportation, routing, and network design. In this...

The problem of district design for the implementation of arc routing activities is addressed. The aim is to partition a road network into a given number of sectors to facilitate the organization of the operations to be implemented within the region. This problem arises in numerous applications such as postal delivery, meter readings, winter gritting, road maintenance, and municipal solid waste ...

Given an undirected graph with edge costs and edge demands, the Capacitated Arc Routing problem (CARP) asks for minimum-cost routes for equal-capacity vehicles so as to satisfy all demands. Constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithms were proposed for CARP with triangle inequality, while CARP was claimed to be NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor in general. Correcting...

This paper presents a very special cutting path determination problem appearing in a high precision tools factory, and provides two new heuristics for its resolution. Particular features of both the cutting process, and of the material to be cut, bring in a set of unusual constraints, when compared with other cutting processes, which confer additional complexity and originality to the problem. ...

This paper presents two ideas to guide a tabu search algorithm for the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem to a promising region of the solution space. Both ideas involve edge-reordering, although they work in different ways. One of them aims to directly tackle deadheading cycles, and the other tries to reorder edges with the aim of extending a scope of solutions that can be reached from a given so...

In this paper we present several heuristic algorithms and a cutting-plane algorithm for the Windy Rural Postman Problem. This problem contains a big number of important Arc Routing Problems as special cases and has very interesting real-life applications. Extensive computational experiments over different sets of instances are also presented.

In arc routing problems, customers are located on arcs, and routes of minimum cost have to be identified. In the Orienteering Arc Routing Problem (OARP), in addition to a set of regular customers that have to be serviced, a set of potential customers is available. From this latter set, customers have to be chosen on the basis of an associated profit. The objective is to find a route servicing t...

The most essential and alluring characteristic of a security estate is the estate’s ability to provide 24-hour security to its residents, of which the continual patrolling of roads and paths is vital. The objective of this paper is to address the lack of sufficient patrol route design procedures by presenting a tabu search algorithm capable of generating multiple patrol routes for an estate’s s...