An efficient metaheuristic to improve accessibility by rural road network planning

In this paper we consider the problem of allocating resources to upgrade a rural road network in order to improve the accessibility of as many people as possible to the main cities or regional center where the economic and social infrastructure is usually located. We propose a solution approach based on the GRASP and VNS Metaheuristic. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated on a set of random small and medium size instances and on a large instance that has been built based on a real road network.