Efficient heuristics for the rural postman problem

A local search framework for the (undirected) Rural Postman Problem (RPP) is presented in this paper. The framework allows local search approaches that have been applied successfully to the well known Travelling Salesman Problem also to be applied to the RPP. New heuristics for the RPP, based on this framework, are introduced and these are capable of solving significantly larger instances of the RPP than have been reported in the literature. Test results are presented for a number of benchmark RPP instances in a bid to compare efficiency and solution quality against known methods.