Divide-and-conquer large scale capacitated arc routing problems with route cutting off decomposition

The capacitated arc routing problem is a very important with many practical applications. This paper focuses on the large scale problem. Traditional solution optimization approaches usually fail because of their poor scalability. divide-and-conquer strategy has achieved great success in solving problems by decomposing original into smaller sub-problems and them separately. For routing, commonly used to divide tasks subsets, then solve induced task subsets However, relies proper division, which non-trivial due complex interactions between tasks. proposes novel decomposition operator, named route cutting off considers sophisticated way. To examine effectiveness we integrate it two state-of-the-art algorithms, compared counterparts wide range benchmark instances. results show that operator can improve decomposition, lead significantly better especially when size time budget tight.