Applying Ant Colony Optimization to the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem

The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP) is a prototypical optimization problem asking a fleet of vehicles to serve a set of customer demands located on the arcs of a network. The problem is closely related to Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), and in fact every CARP instance can be transformed into an equivalent VRP instance using a graph which has a number of nodes twice the number of customer arcs of the original CARP graph [1] plus one.