A Branch-and-Price Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands and Probabilistic Duration Constraints

In many routing applications, it is necessary to place limits on the duration of the individual routes. When demands are stochastic and restocking during route execution is allowed, the durations of the resulting routes are also stochastic. In this paper, we consider the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and (probabilistic) duration constraints (VRPSD-DC). We … Read more

Stronger Multi-Commodity Flow Formulations of the (Capacitated) Sequential Ordering Problem

The “sequential ordering problem” (SOP) is the generalisation of the asymmetric travelling salesman problem in which there are precedence relations between pairs of nodes. Hernández & Salazar introduced a “multi-commodity flow” (MCF) formulation for a generalisation of the SOP in which the vehicle has a limited capacity. We strengthen this MCF formulation by fixing variables … Read more

The split-demand one-commodity pickup-and-delivery travelling salesman problem

This paper introduces a new vehicle routing problem transferring one commodity between customers with a capacitated vehicle that can visit a customer more than once,although a maximum number of visits must be respected. It generalizes the capacitated vehicle routing problem with split demands and some other variants recently addressed in the literature. We model the … Read more

Stronger Multi-Commodity Flow Formulations of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem is a much-studied (and strongly NP-hard) combinatorial optimization problem, for which many integer programming formulations have been proposed. We present some new multi-commodity flow (MCF) formulations, and show that they dominate all of the existing ones, in the sense that their continuous relaxations yield stronger lower bounds. Moreover, we show … Read more

On generalized network design polyhedra

In recent years, there has been an increased literature on so-called Generalized Network Design Problems, such as the Generalized Minimum Spanning Tree Problem and the Generalized Traveling Salesman Problem. In such problems, the node set of a graph is partitioned into clusters, and the feasible solutions must contain one node from each cluster. Up to … Read more