The Windy General Routing Polyhedron: A Global View of Many Known Arc Routing Polyhedra

The Windy Postman Problem consists of finding a minimum cost traversal of all the edges of an undirected graph with two costs associated with each edge, representing the costs of traversing it in each direction. In this paper we deal with the Windy General Routing Problem (WGRP), in which only a subset of edges must be traversed and a subset of vertices must be visited. This is also an NP-hard problem that generalizes many important Arc Routing Problems (ARP’s) and has some interesting real-life applications. Here we study the description of the WGRP polyhedron, for which some general properties and some large families of facet-inducing inequalities are presented. Moreover, since the WGRP contains many well-known routing problems as special cases, this paper also provides a global view of their associated polyhedra. Finally, for the first time, some polyhedral results for several ARP’s defined on mixed graphs formulated using two variables per edge are presented.