A hybrid column generation approach for an industrial waste collection routing problem

Abstract

This paper presents a practical roll-on/roll-off routing (ROROR) problem arising in the collection of industrial waste. Skip containers, which are used for the waste collection, need to be distributed between, and collected from, a set of customers. Full containers must be driven to dump sites, while empty containers must be returned to the depot to await further assignments. Unlike, the traditional ROROR problem, where vehicles may transport one skip container at a time regardless of whether it is full or not, we consider cases in which a vehicle can transport up to eight containers, at most two of which can be full. We propose a Generalized Set Partitioning formulation of the problem and describe a hybrid column generation procedure to solve it. A fast Tabu Search heuristic is used to generate new columns. The proposed methodology is tested on nine data sets, four of which are actual, real-world problem instances. Results indicate that the hybrid column generation outperforms a purely heuristic approach in terms of both running time and solution quality. High quality solutions to problems containing up to 100 orders can be solved in approximately 15 minutes.

An Interactive Biobjective Method for Solving a Waste Collection Problem

“…This strategy adds containers to routes while the capacity of a vehicle or the working-time constraint is not exceeded. However, the regret function, (2) , computes the difference in cost when inserting each unserved container, , into the best route and when inserting it into the secondbest route (obviously in its best position). More formally, (2) …”

“…The process is maintained until the routes are initialized with only one node. Once all routes are initialized, the remaining unserved nodes are included using the function (1) (i.e., minimizing (1) or − (2) according to the considered inclusion strategy).…”

“…It has only two input arguments: an initial solution (line (2)) and the number of neighbourhoods, max . Our VND algorithm uses three neighbourhood structures.…”

“…Recently, other approaches have been published in this field. This is the case of [2], [3], or [4], in which a multiobjective tabu search is proposed for urban waste collection problems.…”

The tractor and semitrailer routing problem with many-to-many demand considering carbon dioxide emissions

“…Hauge et al (2014) presented a type of the RRVRP in which a vehicle could transport up to eight containers, at most two of which can be full. A hybrid column generation procedure was proposed to solve the set partitioning formulation.…”