The General Routing Problem polyhedron: Facets from the Rural Postman Problem and Graphical Traveling Salesman Problem polyhedra

In this paper we study the polyhedron associated with the General Routing Problem (GRP). This problem, first introduced by Orloff in 1974, is a generalization of both the Rural Postman Problem (RPP) and the Graphical Traveling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and, thus, is NP-hard. We describe a formulation of the problem such that from every non-trivial facet-inducing inequality for the RPP and GTSP polyhedra, we obtain facet-inducing inequalities for the GRP polyhedron. We describe a new family of facet-inducing inequalities for the GRP, the honeycomb constraints, which seem to be very useful for solving GRP and RPP instances. Finally, new classes of facets obtained by composition of facet-inducing inequalities are presented.