Analysing the Police Patrol Routing Problem: A Review
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting and novel paper. My concern is that it does not really address how the problem can be solved resp. how a solution can be applied to re-active police behavior. I agree with the authors that the routing problem should be addressed, but they can do more than just reviewing and summarizing the existing literature and stating that more attention is needed!
A minor point: figure 1 is misleading: the exclusion of records precedes screening and not the other way around.
Author Response
Thank you for reviewing our paper. You can find the responses to you comments in the document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Please see comments in attached document
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for reviewing our paper. You can find the responses to you comments in the document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper has a review form. Its objective is to discuss different solution methods that can be used to solve the Police Patrol Routing Problem (PPRP). Although the paper is written in clear and consistent form, the main problem is that I do not see any valuable scientific contribution (especially in context of PPRP).
In my opinion, the main problem is that Authors do not define PPRP or some versions of it. They do not present the objectve function(-s) and specific important constraints which refer to the police patrol, etc.
In many places of the paper they refer to the dynamic and stochastic VRP (page 2, line 87: The PPRP has the structure of the better-known dynamic vehicle routing problem (DVRP)). Hence, review of the methods included in the paper focuses almost only on methods dedicated to D/SVRP (not to PPRP) - see for example: Sections 2 and 4 which in fact refer to dynamic and/or stochastic VRP. My doubt: assuming that PPRP can be modelled as DVRP or/and SVRPS, maybe it is not necessary to find new methods to solve PPRP. Having a lot of efficient approaches dedicated to solving VRP why do not try to use/adapt one of them to solve PPRP?
Quite interesting are sections 3 and 5, where Authors try to suggest what kind of methods/strategies can be used in different situations. But they have rather informal form and the problem needs furter investigation.
By analysis the References part I can suggest to consider the following papers to read:
Reis, D., Melo, A., Coelho, A. L., & Furtado, V. (2006). Towards optimal police patrol routes with genetic algorithms. Intelligence and Security Informatics. Springer
Chawathe, S. S. (2007). Organizing hot-spot police patrol routes. Intelligence and Security Informatics, IEEE, 2007, 79-86.
Chen, X., & Yum, T.-S. P. (2010). Cross Entropy approach for patrol route planning in dynamic environments. Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI), pp.114-119. IEEE International Conference (IEEE).
Fu, J. G. M., & Ang, M. H. (2009). Probabilistic ants (pants) in multi-agent patrolling. In Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (pp. 1371-1376). IEEE/ASME International Conference on IEEE (AIM).
Li Li; Zhongbo Jiang; Ning Duan; WeiShan Dong; Ke Hu; Wei Sun (2011) Police Patrol service optimization based on the spatial pattern of hotspots, Proceedings of 2011 IEEE International Conference on Service Operations, Logistics and Informatics.
Sui Ruana, Candra Meirinaa, Feili Yua, Krishna Pattipatia and Robert L.Popp, (2005) Patrolling in A Stochastic Environment,
http://www.dodccrp.org/events/10th_ICCRTS/CD/papers/278.pdf
Huanfa Chen, Developing Police Patrol Strategies Based on the Urban Street Network, PhD Thesis, 2019, https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10068810/13/Thesis_HC_v11_Final.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for reviewing our paper. You can find our responses to your comments in the document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
In my opinion, the paper has been improved. In its present form, it merits publication in the journal.
Author Response
Thank you for reviewing our paper.
