Fast upper and lower bounds for a large‐scale real‐world arc routing problem

Abstract

Arc Routing Problems (ARPs) are a special kind of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), in which the demands are located on edges or arcs, instead of nodes. There is a huge literature on ARPs, and a variety of exact and heuristic algorithms are available. Recently, however, we encountered some real-life ARPs with over ten thousand roads, which is much larger than those usually considered in the literature. For these problems, we develop fast upper-and lower-bounding procedures. We also present extensive computational results.