Adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm for the rural postman problem with time windows

Abstract

The rural postman problem with time windows is the problem of serving some required edges with one vehicle; the vehicle must visit these edges during established time windows. This article presents a competitive adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm to solve the problem. Computational experiments are performed on a large set of instances with up to 104 required edges. The results show that this approach is efficient, significantly reducing the computational time on large instances and achieving good solutions: the algorithm is able to solve to optimality 224 of 232 instances. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 70(1), 44–59 2017