Team Orientation Problem for Preventive Police Patrol: Modeling, Heuristics and Application

This work proposes the Police Team Orienteering Problem (PTOP), a variant of the Team Orienteering Problem (TOP) adapted to the context of preventive police patrolling. The model jointly incorporates planned revisits, residual temporal protection, and the distinction between drive-by and stop visits, and was developed based on real operational requirements. In addition to the mathematical formulation of the problem, a heuristic based on Iterated Local Search and a system for generating police patrol routes are proposed. The approach was evaluated on instances adapted from Chao's classical TOP benchmark and on real data, with the results approved by a domain specialist. Computational results indicate that the exact method performs better on smaller instances, while the heuristic obtains better or equal solutions in most cases.