Recent Trends in Arc Routing

Abstract

Arc routing problems (ARPs) arise naturally in several applications where streets require maintenance, or customers located along road must be serviced. The undirected rural postman problem (URPP) is to determine a least cost tour traversing at least once each edge that requires a service. When demands are put on the edges and this total demand must be covered by a fleet of identical vehicles of capacity Q based at a depot, one gets the undirected capacitated arc routing problem (UCARP). The URPP and UCARP are known to be NP-hard. This chapter reports on recent exact and heuristic algorithms for the URPP and UCARP.