Selective Pricing in Branch-Price-and-Cut Algorithms for Vehicle Routing

Branch-price-and-cut is a leading methodology for solving various vehicle routing problems (VRPs). For many VRPs, the pricing subproblem of a branch-price-and-cut algorithm is highly time consuming, and to alleviate this difficulty, a relaxed pricing subproblem is used. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm, called selective pricing, that can be applied in this context to reduce the time required for solving hard-to-solve VRPs by branch-price-and-cut. This paradigm requires the development of a labeling algorithm specific to the pricing subproblem. To illustrate selective pricing, we apply it to a branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the VRP with time windows, where the relaxed pricing subproblem is a shortest ng-path problem with resource constraints. We develop a labeling algorithm for this subproblem and show through computational experiments that it can yield significant time reductions (up to 32%) to reach a good lower bound on certain very-hard-to-solve VRPTW instances with 200 customers. We also introduce a new labeling heuristic which also leads to computational time reductions.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1007/s13676-017-0112-9
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/issn/21924376
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Copyright © 2017, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and EURO - The Association of European Operational Research Societies.The contents of this paper reflect the views of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views or policies of the Transportation Research Board or the National Academy of Sciences.
• Authors:
  • Desaulniers, Guy
  • Pecin, Diego
  • Contardo, Claudio
  • 0000-0001-7595-3904
• Publication Date: 2019-6

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Pagination: pp 147-168
• Serial:
  • EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics
  • Volume: 8
  • Issue Number: 2
  • Publisher: SPRINGER VERLAG HEIDELBERG
  • ISSN: 2192-4376
  • EISSN: 2192-4384
  • Serial URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/2192-4376/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Pickup and delivery service; Pricing; Routing; Shortest path algorithms
• Identifier Terms: Vehicle Routing Problem
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01712628
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 26 2019 11:53AM