Solving the Rural Postman Problem by Memetic Algorithms

The Rural Postman Problem (RPP), as an Arc Routing Problem (ARP), consists of determining a minimum cost tour of a specified arc set of a graph (G=(V,A)) but, with the particularity that only a subset R (R ⊆ A) of arcs is required to be traversed at least once. RPPs are applied in a variety of practical contexts, namely the industrial interesting case of path optimization for components cutting operations. The RPP is NP-hard which makes the search of the global optimum a very difficult task. So, in general, heuristics have been used to obtain near optimal solutions. These heuristics are referred in Section 2, together with the definition of the RPP.