Designing service sectors for daily maintenance operations in a road network

摘要

The problem of designing service sectors in a road network for the organisation of route maintenance activities is addressed in this paper. The decisions involve determining the locations of a set of depots and assigning road segments to the selected depots to form service sectors. Routing operations must be taken into consideration while partitioning service sectors in order to precisely evaluate deadhead and required number of vehicles. The problem is thus formulated as a location-arc routing problem and solved by a branch-and-cut algorithm. A three-stage heuristic algorithm with sector design component is developed to solve the medium- and large-sized problems. The computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the heuristic algorithm, and the superiority of the heuristic algorithm to the exact method in terms of some specific partition evaluation criteria.