A Tabu Search based Heuristic for Arc Routing with a Capacity Constraint and Time Deadline

Abstract

The problem considered is to find the minimum cost set of routes which enable vehicles to service a set of required arcs in a network subject to the service capacity of the vehicles and a time constraint by which each arc must be serviced. The problem is NP-Hard so heuristic methods are required to give good solutions within an acceptable computing time. A new tabu search based heuristic called LOCSAR is introduced and compared with other approaches.