Abstract
The profitable arc tour problem is a variant in the vehicle routing problems. It is included in the family of the vehicle routing with profit problems in which a set of vehicle tours are constructed. The objective is to find a set of cycles in the vehicle tours that maximize the collection of profits minus travel costs, subject to constraints limiting the length of cycles that profit is available on arcs. To solve this variant we adopted two metaheuristics based on adaptive memory. We show that our algorithms provide good results in terms of solution quality and running times. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2011) 62, 2013-2022. doi:10.1057/jors.2010.179 Published online 15 December 2010