New heuristics and lower bounds for the Min-Max k-chinese postman problem

Abstract

Given an undirected edge-weighted graph and a depot node, postman problems are generally concerned with traversing the edges of the graph (starting and ending at the depot node) while minimizing the distance traveled. For the Min-Max k-Chinese Postman Problem (MM k-CPP) we have k> 1 postmen and want to minimize the longest of the k tours. We present two new heuristics and improvement procedures for the MM k-CPP. Furthermore, we give three new lower bounds in order to assess the quality of the heuristics. Extensive computational results show that our algorithms outperform the heuristic of Frederickson et al. [12].