A guided local search heuristic for the capacitated arc routing problem

This paper presents a new local search algorithm for the capacitated arc routing problem (CARP). The procedure uses single vehicle moves and moves that operate on two routes, both derived from a node routing context but properly adapted to work well for arc routing problems. We combine the algorithm with the meta-heuristic guided local search and further use the mechanisms of neighbor lists and edge marking to improve the solution quality and to save computation time. Experiments on standard benchmark problems from the literature show that our algorithm outperforms the existing heuristics for the CARP. On a set of new test problems, the local search approach consistently produces high quality solutions and often detects an optimal solution within limited computation time. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.