An Improved Approximation Algorithm for the Capacitated Arc Routing Problem

Abstract: The Capacitated Arc Routing Problem (CARP), introduced by Golden and Wong in 1981, is an important arc routing problem in Operations Research, which generalizes the famous Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). When every customer has a unit demand, the best known approximation ratio for CARP, given by Jansen in 1993, remains $\frac{5}{2}-\frac{1.5}{k}$, where $k$ denotes the vehicle capacity. Based on recent progress in approximating CVRP, we improve this result by proposing a $(\frac{5}{2}-\Theta(\frac{1}{\sqrt{k}}))$-approximation algorithm, which to the best of our knowledge constitutes the first improvement over Jansen's bound.