Multi-depot rural postman problems

Elena Fernández () and Jessica Rodríguez-Pereira ()
Additional contact information
Elena Fernández: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BcnTech
Jessica Rodríguez-Pereira: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BcnTech

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, 2017, vol. 25, issue 2, No 10, 340-372

Abstract: Abstract This paper studies multi-depot rural postman problems on an undirected graph. These problems extend the well-known undirected rural postman problem to the case where there are several depots instead of just one. Linear integer programming formulations that only use binary variables are proposed for the problem that minimizes the overall routing costs and for the model that minimizes the length of the longest route. An exact branch-and-cut algorithm is presented for each considered model, where violated constraints of both types are separated in polynomial time. Despite the difficulty of the problems, the numerical results from a series of computational experiments with various types of instances illustrate a quite good behavior of the algorithms. When the overall routing costs are minimized, over 43 % of the instances were optimally solved at the root node, and 95 % were solved at termination, most of them with a small additional computational effort. When the length of the longest route is minimized, over 25 % of the instances were optimally solved at the root node, and 99 % were solved at termination.

Keywords: Arc routing; Multi-depot rural postman problem; Binary formulation; 90B06 Transportation; logistics; 90C11 Mixed integer programming; 90C57 Polyhedral combinatorics; branch-and-bound; branch-and-cut (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11750-016-0434-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:topjnl:v:25:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s11750-016-0434-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://link.springer.de/orders.htm

DOI: 10.1007/s11750-016-0434-z

Access Statistics for this article

TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research is currently edited by Juan José Salazar González and Gustavo Bergantiños

More articles in TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research from Springer, Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().