1,721,042 research outputs found
Exact method for the vehicle routing problem with backhauls
No full textWe consider the problem in which a fleet of vehicles located at a central depot is to be optimally used to serve a set of customers partitioned into two subsets of linehaul and backhaul customers. Each route starts and ends at the depot and the backhaul customers must be visited after the linehaul customers. A new (0-1) integer programming formulation of this problem is presented. We describe a procedure that computes a valid lower bound to the optimal solution cost by combining different heuristic methods for solving the dual of the LP-relaxation of the exact formulation. An algorithm for the exact solution of the problem is presented. Computational tests on problems proposed in the literature show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in solving problems up to 100 customers
The Two-Dimensional Finite Bin Packing Problem. Part II: New lower and upper bounds
No full textThis paper is the second of a two part series and describes new lower and upper bounds for a more general version of the Two-Dimensional Finite Bin Packing Problem (2BP) than the one considered in Part I (see Boschetti and Mingozzi 2002). With each item is associated an input parameter specifying if it has a fixed orientation or it can be rotated by 90°. This problem contains as special cases the oriented and non-oriented 2BP. The new lower bound is based on the one described in Part I for the oriented 2BP. The computational results on the test problems derived from the literature show the effectiveness of the new proposed lower and upper bounds. © 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg
The two-dimensional finite bin packing problem. Part I: New lower bounds for the oriented case
No full textThe Two-Dimensional Finite Bin Packing Problem (2BP) consists of determining the minimum number of large identical rectangles, bins, that are required for allocating without overlapping a given set of rectangular items. The items are allocated into a bin with their edges always parallel or orthogonal to the bin edges. The problem is strongly NP-hard and finds many practical applications. In this paper we describe new lower bounds for the 2BP where the items have a fixed orientation and we show that the new lower bounds dominate two lower bounds proposed in the literature. These lower bounds are extended in Part II (see Boschetti and Mingozzi 2002) for a more general version of the 2BP where some items can be rotated by 90°. Moreover, in Part II a new heuristic algorithm for solving both versions of the 2BP is presented and computational results on test problems from the literature are given in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed lower bounds. © 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg
Dynamic ng-path relaxation for the delivery man problem
No full textThe ng-path relaxation was introduced by Baldacci, Mingozzi, and Roberti [Baldacci R, Mingozzi A, Roberti R (2011) New route relaxation and pricing strategies for the vehicle routing problem. Oper. Res. 59(5):1269–1283] for computing tight lower bounds to vehicle routing problems by solving a relaxation of the set-partitioning formulation, where routes are not necessarily elementary and can contain predefined subtours. The strength of the achieved lower bounds depends on the subtours that routes can perform. In this paper, we introduce a new general bounding procedure called dynamic ng-path relaxation that enhances the one of Baldacci, Mingozzi, and Roberti (2011) by iteratively redefining the subtours that routes can perform. We apply the bounding procedure on the well-known delivery man problem, which is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem where costs for traversing arcs depend on their positions along the tour. The proposed bounding procedure is based on column generation and computes a sequence of nondecreasing lower bounds to the problem. The final lower bound is used to solve the problem to optimality with a simple dynamic programming recursion. An extensive computational analysis on benchmark instances from the TSPLIB shows that the new bounding procedure yields better lower bounds than those provided by the method of Baldacci, Mingozzi, and Roberti (2011). Furthermore, the proposed exact method outperforms other exact methods recently presented in the literature and is able to close five open instances with up to 150 vertices
New state-space relaxations for solving the traveling salesman problem with time windows
No full textThe traveling salesman problem with time windows (TSPTW) is the problem of finding in a weighted digraph a least-cost tour starting from a selected vertex, visiting each vertex of the graph exactly once according to a given time window, and returning to the starting vertex. This NP-hard problem arises in routing and scheduling applications. This paper introduces a new tour relaxation, called ngL-tour, to compute a valid lower bound on the TSPTW obtained as the cost of a near-optimal dual solution of a problem that seeks a minimum-weight convex combination of nonnecessarily elementary tours. This problem is solved by column generation. The optimal integer TSPTW solution is computed with a dynamic programming algorithm that uses bounding functions based on different tour relaxations and the dual solution obtained. An extensive computational analysis on basically all TSPTW instances (involving up to 233 vertices) from the literature is reported. The results show that the proposed algorithm solves all but one instance and outperforms all exact methods published in the literature so far
New route relaxation and pricing strategies for the vehicle routing problem
No full textIn this paper, we describe an effective exact method for solving both the capacitated vehicle routing problem (cvrp) and the vehicle routing problem with time windows (vrptw) that improves the method proposed by Baldacci et al. [Baldacci, R., N. Christofides, A. Mingozzi. 2008. An exact algorithm for the vehicle routing problem based on the set partitioning formulation with additional cuts. Math. Programming 115(2) 351-385] for the cvrp. The proposed algorithm is based on the set partitioning (SP) formulation of the problem. We introduce a new route relaxation called ng-route, used by different dual ascent heuristics to find near-optimal dual solutions of the LP-relaxation of the SP model. We describe a column-and-cut generation algorithm strengthened by valid inequalities that uses a new strategy for solving the pricing problem. The new ng-route relaxation and the different dual solutions achieved allow us to generate a reduced SP problem containing all routes of any optimal solution that is finally solved by an integer programming solver. The proposed method solves four of the five open Solomon's vrptw instances and significantly improves the running times of state-of-the-art algorithms for both vrptw and cvrp. Subject classifications: vehicle routing; time windows; dual ascent heuristic; column-and-cut generation. Area of review: Transportation. History: Received March 2010; revision received September 2010; accepted November 2010. © 2011 INFORMS
An exact method for the capacitated location-routing problem
No full textThe capacitated location-routing problem (LRP) consists of opening one or more depots on a given set of a-priori defined depot locations, and designing, for each opened depot, a number of routes in order to supply the demands of a given set of customers. With each depot are associated a fixed cost for opening it and a capacity that limits the quantity that can be delivered to the customers. The objective is to minimize the sum of the fixed costs for opening the depots and the costs of the routes operated from the depots. This paper describes a new exact method for solving the LRP based on a set-partitioning-like formulation of the problem. The lower bounds produced by different bounding procedures, based on dynamic programming and dual ascent methods, are used by an algorithm that decomposes the LRP into a limited set of multicapacitated depot vehicle-routing problems (MCDVRPs). Computational results on benchmark instances from the literature show that the proposed method outperforms the current best-known exact methods, both for the quality of the lower bounds achieved and the number and the dimensions of the instances solved to optimality
Dynamic programming strategies for the traveling salesman problem with time window and precedence constraints
No full textRecent exact algorithms for solving the vehicle routing problem under capacity and time window constraints
No full textThis paper provides a review of the recent developments that had a major impact on the current state-of-the-art exact algorithms for the vehicle routing problem (VRP). The paper reviews mathematical formulations, relaxations and recent exact methods for two of the most important variants of the VRP: the capacitated VRP (CVRP) and the VRP with time windows (VRPTW). The paper also reports a comparison of the computational performances of the different exact algorithms for the CVRP and VRPTW. © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
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