The periodic vehicle routing problem PVRP first appeared in 1974 in a paper about garbage collection Beltrami and Bodin, Networks 4 1974, 65-74. The wide applicability and versatility of the problem has led to a vast body of literature addressing both novel applications and solution methods. This article discusses the wide array of circumstances and settings in which the PVRP has been applied and describes the development of solution methods, both exact and heuristic, for the PVRP. As with many core research problems, many variants have been proposed. We will describe additional problem variants and extensions, as well as discuss the future of research for the PVRP. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 631, 2-15 2014

Forty years of periodic vehicle routing

Arc routing problems are vehicle routing problems in which the tasks to be performed are located on some arcs or edges of a network, e.g., spreading salt on a road or collecting municipal refuse in a street. They have been much less studied than node routing problems but impressive developments have been achieved in the last decade. The objective of this article is to survey these recent results and to provide an annotated bibliography. Except for a few references, the period surveyed starts from the publication of the book “Arc routing: theory, solutions and applications”, edited by Dror in 2000. The article is made up of two main parts: one on uncapacitated (single vehicle) problems derived from the Chinese Postman Problem, the Rural Postman Problem, and the General Routing Problem; and one on multivehicle or capacitated problems such as the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, 2010

Recent results on Arc Routing Problems: An annotated bibliography

OR in developing countries: A review

Hybrid genetic algorithm for the open capacitated arc routing problem

A new view on Rural Postman based on Eulerian Extension and Matching

A local search framework for the (undirected) Rural Postman Problem (RPP) is presented in this paper. The framework allows local search approaches that have been applied successfully to the well–known Travelling Salesman Problem also to be applied to the RPP. New heuristics for the RPP, based on this framework, are introduced and these are capable of solving significantly larger instances of the RPP than have been reported in the literature. Test results are presented for a number of benchmark RPP instances in a bid to compare efficiency and solution quality against known methods. Key words: Chinese Postman Problem, Rural Postman Problem, Travelling Salesman Problem. ORiON Vol.21(1) 2005: 33-51

/pdf/efficient-heuristics-for-the-rural-postman-problem-3136o36jwi.pdf

Efficient heuristics for the Rural Postman Problem

https://www.orssa.org.za/wiki/uploads/Awards/TR2002Paper.pdf

Network service scheduling and routing

Practical vehicle routing problems generally have both routing and scheduling aspects to consider. However, few heuristic methods exist that address both these complicated aspects simultaneously. We present heuristics to determine an efficient circular traversal of a weighted graph that requires a subset of its edges to be traversed, each a specified (potentially different) number of times. Consecutive time instances at which the same edge has to be traversed should additionally be spaced through a scheduling time window as evenly as possible, thus introducing a scheduling consideration to the problem. We present a route construction heuristic for the problem, based on well–known graph theoretic algorithms, as well as a route improvement heuristic, that accepts the solution generated by the construction heuristic as input and attempts to improve it in an iterative fashion. We apply the heuristics to various randomly generated problem instances, and interpret these test results. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. NETWORKS, Vol. 46(2), 69–81 2005

G. W. Groves

Papers

Efficient heuristics for the Rural Postman Problem

Network service scheduling and routing

On a routing and scheduling problem concerning multiple edge traversals in graphs