Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem with time windows is concerned with the optimal routing of a fleet of vehicles between a depot and a number of customers that must be visited within a specified time interval, called a time window. The purpose of this thesis is to develop new and efficient solution techniques for solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The thesis consists of a section of introductory remarks and four independent papers.The first paper 'Formulations and exact approaches for the vehicle routing problem with time windows' (Kallehauge, 2005, unpublished) is a review of the exact algorithms proposed in the last three decades for the solution of the vehicle routing problem with time windows. A detailed analysis of the formulations of the VRPTW is presented together with a review of the literature related to the different formulations. We present the two main lines of development in relation to the exact approaches for the VRPTW. One is concerned with the general decomposition approach and the solution to certain dual problems associated with the VRPTW. Another more recent direction is concerned with the analysis of the polyhedral structure of the VRPTW. We conclude by examining possible future lines of research in the area of the VRPTW.In the second paper 'Lagrangian duality applied to the vehicle routing problem with time windows' (Kallehauge, Larsen, and Madsen, Computers & Operations Research, 33:1464-1487 we consider the Lagrangian relaxation of the constraint set requiring that each customer must be served by exactly one vehicle yielding a constrained shortest path subproblem. We present a stabilized cutting-plane algorithm within the framework of linear programming for solving the associated Lagrangian dual problem. This algorithm creates easier constrained shortest path subproblems because less negative cycles are introduced and it leads to faster multiplier convergence due to a stabilization of the dual variables. We have embedded the stabilized cutting-plane algorithm in a branch-and-bound search and introduce strong valid inequalities at the master problem level by Lagrangian relaxation. The result is a Lagrangian branch-andcut-and-price (LBCP) algorithm for the VRPTW. Making use of this acceleration strategy at the master problem level gives a significant speed-up compared to algorithms in the literature based on traditional column generation. We have solved two test problems introduced in 2001 by Gehring and Homberger with 400 and 1000 customers respectively, which to date are the largest problems ever solved to optimality. We have implemented the LBCP algorithm using the ABACUS open-source framework for solving mixed-integer linear-programs by branch, cut, and price.In the third paper 'Path inequalities for the vehicle routing problem with time windows' (Kallehauge, Boland, and Madsen, 2005, submitted) we introduce a new formulation of the VRPTW involving only binary variables associated with the arcs in the underlying digraph. The new formulation is based on a f...

The Home Care Crew Scheduling Problem: Preference-based visit clustering and temporal dependencies

“…There is a vast amount of literature on column generation based solution methods for VRPTW, see e.g. Kallehauge et al (2005) for a recent literature review and an introduction to the method. In a branch-and-price framework the problem is split into two problems, a master problem and a subproblem.…”

“…HCCSP generalises the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) for which column generation solution algorithms have proven successful, see Kallehauge et al (2005). Therefore, we model HCCSP as a Set Partitioning Problem (SPP) with side constraints and develop a branch-andprice solution algorithm.…”

“…The literature on VRPTW is huge. We refer to Kallehauge et al (2005) and Cordeau et al (2002). Recently, a variant of VRPTW very similar to the HCCSP has been described in Dohn et al (2009b).…”

Layered Formulation for the Robust Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

“…In [14], routes or paths that cannot satisfy the time windows are cut-off by path inequalities. Formulations based on path variables are also very popular for all versions of vehicle routing problems, including the V RP T W , see [9,15], among others. These formulations contain a little number of constraints but a very large number of variables so that efficient branch-and-price algorithms are required.…”

Evaluation of trip and car sharing concepts for home health care services

“…For details on the VRPTW, refer to Gendreau (2005a, (2005b) and Kallehauge et al (2005). In practice, nurses either use their private cars or vehicles provided by the HHC provider.…”