Branch-and-Price-and-Cut for the Active-Passive Vehicle-Routing Problem

This paper presents a branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for the exact solution of the active-passive vehicle-routing problem (APVRP). The APVRP covers a range of logistics applications where pickup-and-delivery requests necessitate a joint operation of active vehicles (e.g., trucks) and passive vehicles (e.g., loading devices such as containers or swap bodies). The objective is to minimize a weighted sum of the total distance traveled, the total completion time of the routes, and the number of unserved requests. To this end, the problem supports a flexible coupling and decoupling of active and passive vehicles at customer locations. Accordingly, the operations of the vehicles have to be synchronized carefully in the planning. The contribution of the paper is twofold: First, we present an exact branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm for this class of routing problems with synchronization constraints. To our knowledge, this algorithm is the first such approach that considers explicitly the temporal interdepend...