Benchmark instances for road network repair and restoration problems in the context of disaster response operations

This article presents a database which contains a comprehensive and systematically varied set of network instances. These can be applied as benchmarks for multiple road repair and restoration problems in the context of natural disasters. The characteristics of the instances vary in terms of network size, intensity and type of disaster affecting the road network, the epicenter's location, and the number of sub-networks in which the initial network is divided after the disaster occurs. The instances were developed primarily for the Multi-vehicle Prize Collecting Arc Routing for Connectivity Problem (KPC-ARCP). These are however easily adaptable to other well-known connectivity, vehicle routing, and facility location problems in the Operations Research literature. The instances are available on a public repository, as is the Python code to generate the instances.