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 security guards. The paper shows that the problem of designing these routes can be modelled as an Arc Routing Problem, specifically as min-max k postmen problems. The algorithm is illustrated with a real problem instance from an estate in Gauteng, South Africa. The patrol routes generated by the algorithm provide a significant improvement in the even patrolling of the road network, and a more balanced work distribution among guards. The algorithm is also tested on several benchmark problems from literature.

No abstract

This paper develops optimal and quick near-optimal splitting procedures for the Mixed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem under Time restrictions with Intermediate Facilities. Splitting procedures are a key component of giant tour-based solution methods for Arc Routing Problems. The optimal and near-optimal splitting procedures are tested within a multi-start constructive heuristic, and a fixed execution-time limit is imposed. Results on benchmark instances show that the constructive-heuristic linked with the new optimal splitting algorithm performs better than the near-optimal versions.

No abstract

In this article we present benchmark datasets for the Mixed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem under Time restrictions with Intermediate Facilities (MCARPTIF). The problem is a generalisation of the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP), and closely represents waste collection routing. Four different test sets are presented, each consisting of multiple instance files, and which can be used to benchmark different solution approaches for the MCARPTIF. An in-depth description of the datasets can be found in “Constructive heuristics for the Mixed Capacity Arc Routing Problem under Time Restrictions with Intermediate Facilities” (Willemseand Joubert, 2016) [2] and “Splitting procedures for the Mixed Capacitated Arc Routing Problem under Time restrictions with Intermediate Facilities” (Willemseand Joubert, in press) [4]. The datasets are publicly available from “Library of benchmark test sets for variants of the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem under Time restrictions with Intermediate Facilities” (Willemse and Joubert, 2016) [3].