GRASP and path relinking for the clustered prize-collecting arc routing problem

Abstract

The Clustered Prize-collecting Arc Routing Problem is an arc routing problem where each demand edge is associated with a profit which is collected once if the edge is serviced, independently of the number of times it is traversed. It is further required that if a demand edge is serviced, then all the demand edges of its component are also serviced. This paper presents GRASP and Path Relinking heuristics for the Clustered Prizecollecting Arc Routing Problem. For the constructive phase of the GRASP two different strategies are considered. One of them follows a bottom-up style whereas the other one is a top-down procedure. The best solutions obtained with both strategies are used as elite solutions for the Path Relinking. The results of extensive computational experiments are presented and analyzed. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011.