Heuristics for the Weighted k-Chinese/rural Postman Problem with a Hint of Fixed Costs with Applications to Urban Snow Removal

We describe a weighted version of the k-Chinese or k-rural postman problem that occurs in the context of snow removal. The problem concerns the questions of which vehicle shall do each task and how the vehicles shall travel between tasks. We also consider different numbers of vehicles, in view of a fixed cost for each vehicle. We describe and discuss heuristic solution approaches, based on usable substructures, such as Chinese/rural postman problems, meta-heuristics, k-means clustering and local search improvements by moving cycles. The methods have been implemented and tested on real life examples.