The Arc Routing and Scheduling Problem with Transshipment

This article introduces the Arc Routing and Scheduling Problem with Transshipment (ARPT), a particular Arc Routing Problem whose applications arise in garbage collection. In the ARPT,the demand is collected by specially equipped vehicles, taken to a transfer station, shredded or compacted and, finally, transported to a dump site by means of high-capacity trucks. A lower bound, based on a relaxation of an integer linear formulation of the problem, is developed for the ARPT. A tailored Tabu Search heuristic is also devised. Computational results on a set of benchmark instances are reported.