Column Elimination: An Iterative Approach to Solving Integer Programs

We present column elimination as a general framework for solving (large-scale) integer programming problems. In this framework, solutions are represented compactly as paths in a directed acyclic graph. Column elimination starts with a relaxed representation, that may contain infeasible paths, and solves a constrained network flow over the graph to find a solution. It then … Read more

Column Elimination for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems

We introduce a column elimination procedure for the capacitated vehicle routing problem. Our procedure maintains a decision diagram to represent a relaxation of the set of feasible routes, over which we define a constrained network flow. The optimal solution corresponds to a collection of paths in the decision diagram and yields a dual bound. The … Read more