A heuristic approach for the open capacitated arc routing problem

The open capacitated arc routing problem (OCARP) is defined and considered in this paper. The OCARP differs from the classic capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) because the vehicles are not required to return to the depot. The OCARP seeks to find a set of minimum cost open routes that serve task arcs of a given graph, subject to vehicle capacity and travel distance span restrictions. A mathematical programming formulation and a lower bound are established. An effective memetic algorithm is developed to solve the OCARP. Computational experiments on randomly generated instances are conducted. The results show that the proposed algorithm can produce high quality solutions within a reasonable computational time span.