The min-max close-enough arc routing problem

Here we introduce the Min-Max Close-Enough Arc Routing Problem, where a fleet of vehicles must serve a set of customers while trying to balance the length of the routes. The vehicles do not need to visit the customers, since they can serve them from a distance by traversing arcs that are "close enough" to the customers. We present two formulations of the problem and propose a branch-and-cut and a branch-and price algorithm based on the respective formulations. A heuristic algorithm used to provide good upper bounds to the exact procedures is also presented. Extensive computational experiments to compare the performance of the algorithms are carried out. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ )