Designing visually and operationally attractive routes to improve driver acceptance in road cleaning vehicle routing problem

As urbanization accelerates, the planning of effective operating routes for urban road cleaning fleets has become a significant concern for municipalities. However, traditional vehicle routing algorithms often overlook drivers’ route preferences, resulting in poor driver acceptance. This study aims to design routes that are simultaneously cost-effective and attractive to drivers, thereby facilitating the implementation of efficient algorithms. Based on an analysis of road cleaning tasks and driver behavior, we introduce the concept of ”operational attractiveness” to complement the notion of visual attractiveness in road cleaning contexts. Two strategies are proposed for improving driver acceptance: imitating drivers’ routing behavior and reducing route overlap. The first strategy enhances the operational attractiveness of the route, while the second focuses on its visual attractiveness. We have integrated these two strategies into Randomized-Merge (RM), which is known for its remarkable cost-optimization performance. Numerical experiments on one real-world instance and ten new randomly generated instances show that the proposed heuristics can generate routes with lower cost than RM. Moreover, these routes are more attractive based on operational and visual metrics.