The undirected capacitated arc routing problem with profits

A profit and a demand are associated with each edge of a set of profitable edges of a given graph. A travel time is associated with each edge of the graph. A fleet of capacitated vehicles is given to serve the profitable edges. A maximum duration of the route of each vehicle is also given. The profit of an edge can be collected by one vehicle only that also serves the demand of the edge. The objective of this problem, which is called the undirected capacitated arc routing problem with profits (UCARPP), is to find a set of routes that satisfy the constraints on the duration of the route and on the capacity of the vehicle and maximize the total collected profit. We propose a branch-and-price algorithm and several heuristics. We can solve exactly instances with up to 97 profitable edges. The best heuristics find the optimal solution on most of instances where it is available.