TY - JOUR
T1 - Branch-and-cut-and-price for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and convex node costs
AU - He, Qie
AU - Irnich, Stefan
AU - Song, Yongjia
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 INFORMS.
PY - 2019
Y1 - 2019
N2 - Two critical yet frequently conflicting objectives for logistics and transportation service companies are improving customer satisfaction and reducing transportation cost. In particular, given a network of customer requests with preferred service times, it is very challenging to find vehicle routes and service schedules simultaneously that respect all operating constraints and minimize the total transportation and customers' inconvenience costs. In this paper, we introduce the vehicle routing problem with time windows and convex node costs (VRPTW-CNC), in which we model each customer's inconvenience cost as a convex function of the service start time at that customer. The VRPTW-CNC combines and extends both the standard vehicle routing problem with time windows and some previous results on the optimal service scheduling problem over a fixed route.We propose a branch-and-cut-andprice algorithm to solve the VRPTW-CNC with general convex inconvenience cost functions. To solve the pricing problem, our labeling algorithm only generates labels that possibly lead to optimal schedule times over a route, which significantly improves the effectiveness of pricing. Extensive computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
AB - Two critical yet frequently conflicting objectives for logistics and transportation service companies are improving customer satisfaction and reducing transportation cost. In particular, given a network of customer requests with preferred service times, it is very challenging to find vehicle routes and service schedules simultaneously that respect all operating constraints and minimize the total transportation and customers' inconvenience costs. In this paper, we introduce the vehicle routing problem with time windows and convex node costs (VRPTW-CNC), in which we model each customer's inconvenience cost as a convex function of the service start time at that customer. The VRPTW-CNC combines and extends both the standard vehicle routing problem with time windows and some previous results on the optimal service scheduling problem over a fixed route.We propose a branch-and-cut-andprice algorithm to solve the VRPTW-CNC with general convex inconvenience cost functions. To solve the pricing problem, our labeling algorithm only generates labels that possibly lead to optimal schedule times over a route, which significantly improves the effectiveness of pricing. Extensive computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
KW - Branch-and-cut-and-price
KW - Convex node costs
KW - Integrated routing and scheduling
KW - Labeling algorithm
KW - Vehicle routing problem
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U2 - 10.1287/trsc.2019.0891
DO - 10.1287/trsc.2019.0891
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85077442368
SN - 0041-1655
VL - 53
SP - 1409
EP - 1426
JO - Transportation Science
JF - Transportation Science
IS - 5
ER -