The Arc Oriented Location Routing Problem

The location routing problem is concerned with locating depots and creating routes to service customers. In particular, location-allocation-routing (LAR) algorithms are designed to locate facilities, allocate customers to facilities and design the routes through these customers. In the literature, the typical location routing problem is a node oriented problem, where depots and customers are all represented by nodes and the routing is a node routing problem. In this paper, an Arc Oriented Location Routing Problem (AOLRP) is described, where the customers to be serviced are represented by arcs. Therefore, the allocation of customers to depots is an arc oriented problem as well as the resulting routing problem. An algorithm is presented for solving the AOLRP and computational results are given regarding parameter settings and performance of this algorithm.