Split-Delivery Capacitated Arc-Routing Problem With Time Windows

Motivated by some practical applications in urban services such as water sparkling, we study a split-delivery capacitated arc-routing problem with time windows (SDCARPTW). It is a variant of arc-routing problem and is defined on an undirected graph where the demands on the arcs are splitable, and time window and capacity constraints must be satisfied. We propose a mathematical formulation for SDCARPTW and derive some nice properties of the split-delivery structure, which can help to well represent a solution of SDCARPTW. The dynamic programming, neighborhood search and perturbation process are combined to develop a tabu search algorithm. Through computational studies on CARPTW benchmark datasets, we validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm. New datasets for SDCARPTW are further proposed and the impact of the split-delivery option is analyzed.