(1) Center for Quality and Manufacturing
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
(2) Graduate Program in Systems Engineering
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Mexico
(3) Department of Statistics and Operations Research
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Barcelona, Spain
Abstract: The problem of district design for the implementation of arc routing activities is addressed. The aim is to partition a road network into a given number of sectors to facilitate the organization of the operations to be implemented within the region. This problem arises in numerous applications such as postal delivery, meter readings, winter gritting, road maintenance, and municipal solid waste collection. An integer linear programming model is proposed where a novel node parity constraint to favor Eulerian districts is introduced. Series of instances were solved to assess the impact of the parity constraint on the objective function. Networks with up to 321 nodes and 559 edges were successfully solved. The model is useful at a tactical level as it can be used to promote workload balance, compactness, stem in-stem out distance and parity.