A Column Generation for the Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Open Vehicle Routing Problem

[EN] This paper addressed the heterogeneous fixed fleet open vehicle routing problem (HFFOVRP), in which the vehicles are not required to return to the depot after completing a service. In this new problem, the demands of customers are fulfilled by a heterogeneous fixed fleet of vehicles having various capacities, fixed costs and variable costs. This problem is an important variant of the open vehicle routing problem (OVRP) and can cover more practical situations in transportation and logistics. Since this problem belongs to NP-hard Problems, An approach based on column generation (CG) is applied to solve the HFFOVRP. A tight integer programming model is presented and the linear programming relaxation of which is solved by the CG technique. Since there have been no existing benchmarks, this study generated 19 test problems and the results of the proposed CG algorithm is compared to the results of exact algorithm. Computational experience confirms that the proposed algorithm can provide better solutions within a comparatively shorter period of time.Yousefikhoshbakht, M.; Dolatnejad, A. (2017). A Column Generation for the Heterogeneous Fixed Fleet Open Vehicle Routing Problem. International Journal of Production Management and Engineering. 5(2):55-71. doi:10.4995/ijpme.2017.5916SWORD557152Aleman, R. E., & Hill, R. R. (2010). A tabu search with vocabulary building approach for the vehicle routing problem with split demands. International Journal of Metaheuristics, 1(1), 55. doi:10.1504/ijmheur.2010.033123Anbuudayasankar, S. P., Ganesh, K., Lenny Koh, S. C., & Ducq, Y. (2012). Modified savings heuristics and genetic algorithm for bi-objective vehicle routing problem with forced backhauls. Expert Systems with Applications, 39(3), 2296-2305. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2011.08.009Brandão, J. (2009). A deterministic tabu search algorithm for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem. 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