Heuristic methods for the sectoring arc routing problem

The sectoring arc routing problem (SARP) is introduced to model activities associated with the streets of large urban areas, like municipal waste collection. The aim is to partition the street network into a given number of sectors and to build a set of vehicle trips in each sector, to minimize the total duration of the trips. Two two-phase heuristics and one best insertion method are proposed. In the two-phase methods, phase 1 constructs the sectors using two possible heuristics, while phase 2 solves a mixed capacitated arc routing problem (MCARP) to compute the trips in each sector. The best insertion method determines sectors and trips simultaneously. In addition to solution cost, some evaluation criteria such as imbalance, diameter and dispersion measures are used to compare algorithms. Numerical results on large instances with up to 401 nodes and 1056 links (arcs or edges) are reported and analysed.