Multi-treatment capacitated arc routing of construction machinery in Taiwan's smooth road project

This study investigates the routing problems of road resurfacing in Taiwan's smooth road project, incorporating multiple treatments served by different construction machinery in a way that propagates extra time window constraints to ensure that a subsequent treatment starts after the required preceding treatment has started or been completed. The routing problem is modeled as a multi-treatment capacitated arc routing problem with time windows (MTCARPTW) in order to determine a set of trips at a minimum total cost that covers all required links of road resurfacing work. The MTCARPTW is first transformed into a traveling salesman problem (TSP); then, a heuristics method based on ant colony optimization (ACO) is applied and evaluated based on the set of given circumstances. The computational results indicate that the proposed algorithm is efficient. This research contributes to identifying a new routing problem, modeling this MTCARPTW, and introducing the ACO to solve the problem efficiently.

Research highlights
► This study investigates the routing problems of road resurfacing in Taiwan's smooth road project.
► The multiple treatments served by different construction machinery that propagates extra time window constraints.
► The routing problem is modeled as a multi-treatment capacitated arc routing problem with time windows (MTCARPTW).
► A heuristics method based on ant colony optimization (ACO) is applied to solve the MTCARPTW.
► This research contributes to identifying a new routing problem and introducing the ACO to solve the problem efficiently.