Using Branch-and-Price to Find High Quality Solutions Quickly

We develop an exact solution approach for integer programs that produces high- quality solutions quickly by solving well-chosen restrictions of the problem. Column generation is used both for generating these problem restrictions and for producing bounds on the value of an optimal solution to the problem. Obtaining primal solutions by solving problem restrictions also provides an easy way to search for improved solutions in the neighborhood of the current best solution. The overall approach is parallelized and computational experiments demonstrate its efficacy. An application to inventory routing is presented.