Benchmarking Dynamic Capacitated Arc Routing Algorithms Using Real-World Traffic Simulation

The dynamic capacitated arc routing problem (DCARP) aims at re-scheduling the service plans of agents, such as vehicles in a city scenario, when dynamic events deteriorate the quality of the current schedule. Various algorithms have been proposed to solve DCARP instances in different dynamic scenarios. However, most existing work evaluated their algorithms' performance based on artificially constructed dynamic environments instead of using more realistic traffic simulations which are built on actual traffic data. In this paper, we constructed a novel DCARP benchmarking framework based on the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) transportation simulation software, which allows to include real-world traffic environments for generating a set of DCARP instances from dynamic events, such as road congestion or task changes. The flexibility of the framework allows to develop DCARP optimization algorithms and evaluate their effectiveness more comprehensively. We use the benchmarking framework to generate 12 different dynamic instances using real-world traffic data of Dublin City. We then demonstrate the value of our framework by using these instances to compare our previously proposed hybrid local search algorithm (HyLS) with a state-of-the-art meta-heuristic optimization algorithm. The generated benchmark scenarios indicate that HyLS is a very effective optimizer on DCARP scenarios with real traffic data for reducing the total service cost. They also demonstrate the importance of our DCARP benchmarking framework for the development and benchmarking of optimization algorithms in more realistic scenarios.