Applying Column Generation to the Discrete Fleet Planning Problem

The paper discusses an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation that describes the problem of planning the use of domestic distributed generators, under individual as well as fleet constraints. The planning problem comprises the assignment of time intervals during which the local generator must produce or not. In [1] this ILP is shown to be NP-complete in the strong sense. Heuristic methods have been developed to find solutions in reasonable time. In this work a different technique is used to overcome the complexity problems. We use column generation to search the possible decision vectors in a faster way. The ILP is slightly adjusted to facilitate the column generation technique to search in a clever way through the set of possible solutions. To measure the results, the column generation technique is compared to an earlier developed heuristic method. Both the quality of the objective function and the speed of the methods are compared.