New large-scale data instances for CARP and new variations of CARP

ABSTRACT

The capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) captures important aspects of real-life problems and has been studied extensively over the past two decades. Based on a waste collection project, we introduce a number of new CARP variations. We first present three multi-compartment CARP variations of different levels of complexity regarding compartments and where one incorporates a time horizon. We then present a variation that seeks to coordinate vehicles over a planning horizon such that the vehicles that collect different waste fractions from the same households do so on the same day of the week. Finally, the semi-periodic CARP takes into account that the households on a street, providing the demand of the edge, may not request waste collection at the same interval. We present large-scale instances both for the classical CARP and for the five new problems. The instances are based on real-life networks and waste data from five areas in Denmark and cover rural as well as urban areas. The largest instances contain more than 10,000 nodes. We give detailed information about the construction of the instances from the real-life data, and explain how they can be used to perform scenario analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Capacitated arc routing problem
• waste collection
• real-life benchmark instances
• new variations

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to our collaborators, Frederiksberg county (Frederiksberg county 2017), Odense Renovation (Odense Renovation A/S 2017), Reno Djurs (Reno Djurs 2017), and Renosyd (Renosyd 2017) for sharing their data and their knowledge with us and thereby making this project possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research - Social Sciences project “Transportation issues related to waste management”.