A branch-and-cut algorithm for the profitable windy rural postman problem

Abstract

In this paper we study the profitable windy rural postman problem. This is an arc routing problem with profits defined on a windy graph in which there is a profit associated with some of the edges of the graph, consisting of finding a route maximizing the difference between the total profit collected and the total cost. This problem generalizes the rural postman problem and other well-known arc routing problems and has real-life applications, mainly in snow removal operations. We propose here a formulation for the problem and study its associated polyhedron. Several families of facet-inducing inequalities are described and used in the design of a branch-and-cut procedure. The algorithm has been tested on a large set of benchmark instances and compared with other existing algorithms. The results obtained show that the branch-and-cut algorithm is able to solve large-sized instances optimally in reasonable computing times.