The mixed capacitated general routing problem with turn penalties

In this paper we deal with the mixed capacitated general routing problem with turn penalties. This problem generalizes many important arc and node routing problems, and it takes into account turn penalties and forbidden turns, which are crucial in many real-life applications, such as mail delivery, waste collection and street maintenance operations. Through a polynomial transformation of the considered problem into a Generalized Vehicle routing problem, we suggest a new approach for solving this new problem by transforming it into an Asymmetric Capacitated Vehicle routing problem. In this way, we can solve the new problem both optimally and heuristically using existing algorithms. A powerful memetic algorithm and a set of 336 new benchmark instances are also suggested. The experimental results show that the average deviation of the suggested solution method is less than 0.05% with respect to optimum.