Vehicle Routing and Scheduling with Full Truckloads

Truckload carriers are constantly faced with the problem of shipping full truckloads of goods at minimum cost between pairs of cities or customers, using a fleet of trucks located at one or more depots. In this paper, a new branch-and-bound algorithm for solving an integer-programming formulation of this vehicle-routing problem (VRP) with full truckloads is developed. The algorithm also takes into consideration the time-window constraints and waiting costs. The resulting efficiency, validated by computational tests on random problems, is due to a column-generation scheme that exploits the special structure of the problem to solve the linear-programming relaxation problems that arise at the nodes.

[1]  Harvey M. Salkin,et al.  A set-partitioning-based exact algorithm for the vehicle routing problem , 1989, Networks.

[2]  Reuven R. Levary,et al.  Vehicle routing via column generation , 1985 .

[3]  Jacques Desrosiers,et al.  Chapter 2 Time constrained routing and scheduling , 1995 .

[4]  Alan A. Bertossi,et al.  On some matching problems arising in vehicle scheduling models , 1987, Networks.

[5]  Celso C. Ribeiro,et al.  A Column Generation Approach to the Multiple-Depot Vehicle Scheduling Problem , 1991, Oper. Res..

[6]  Lucio Bianco,et al.  An Exact Algorithm for Combining Vehicle Trips , 1995 .

[7]  M. Fischetti,et al.  Heuristic algorithms for the multiple depot vehicle scheduling problem , 1993 .

[8]  Jacques Desrosiers,et al.  Routing with time windows by column generation , 1983, Networks.

[9]  Guy Desaulniers,et al.  Multi-depot vehicle scheduling problems with time windows and waiting costs , 1996, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[10]  M. Desrochers,et al.  A Generalized Permanent Labelling Algorithm For The Shortest Path Problem With Time Windows , 1988 .

[11]  R. Kraut,et al.  Vehicle scheduling in public transit and Lagrangean pricing , 1998 .

[12]  P. Toth,et al.  Some New Branching and Bounding Criteria for the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem , 1980 .

[13]  Gilbert Laporte,et al.  Vehicle routing with full loads , 1985, Comput. Oper. Res..

[14]  Marshall L. Fisher,et al.  Chapter 1 Vehicle routing , 1995 .

[15]  José M. P. Paixão,et al.  Multiple Depot Vehicle Scheduling Problem: A New Heuristic Based on Quasi-Assignment Algorithms , 1992 .

[16]  Lawrence Bodin,et al.  PLANNING FOR TRUCK FLEET SIZE IN THE PRESENCE OF A COMMON‐CARRIER OPTION , 1983 .

[17]  Jacques Desrosiers,et al.  Time Constrained Routing and Scheduling , 1992 .

[18]  Achim Lamatsch,et al.  An Approach to Vehicle Scheduling with Depot Capacity Constraints , 1992 .

[19]  Martin Desrochers,et al.  A New Optimization Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows , 1990, Oper. Res..

[20]  Marta Mesquita,et al.  Exact algorithms for the multi-depot vehicle scheduling problem based on multicommodity network flow type formulations , 1999 .