The synchronized arc and node routing problem: Application to road marking

This paper introduces the synchronized arc and node routing problem, inspired from a real application arising in road marking operations. In this setting, several capacitated vehicles are used to paint lines on the roads and a tank vehicle is used to replenish the painting vehicles. The aim of the problem is to determine the routes and schedules for the painting and replenishment vehicles so that the pavement marking is completed within the least possible time. This must be done in such a way that the routes of the painting and replenishment vehicles are synchronized. An adaptive large neighborhood heuristic is described and evaluated over a large set of artificial instances.