Heuristic and exact methods applied to a rich vehicle routing and scheduling problem.

This study considers a vehicle routing problem with time windows, accessibility restrictions on customers and a fleet that is heterogeneous with regard to capacity, average speed and cost. A vehicle can perform multiple routes per day, all starting and ending at a single depot, and it is assigned to...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Seixas, Michel Povlovitsch
Tipo de recurso: tesis doctoral
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2013
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
Repositorio:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:teses.usp.br:tde-09072014-111258
Acceso en línea:http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/3/3135/tde-09072014-111258/
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Branch-and-price
Busca tabu
Column generation
Dynamic programming
Geração de colunas
Programação dinâmica
Roteirização
Routing
Tabu search
Descripción
Sumario:This study considers a vehicle routing problem with time windows, accessibility restrictions on customers and a fleet that is heterogeneous with regard to capacity, average speed and cost. A vehicle can perform multiple routes per day, all starting and ending at a single depot, and it is assigned to a single driver, whose total work hours are limited. The available fleet is divided into an owned fleet, for which a variable cost is incurred, and a chartered fleet, for which only a fixed cost is incurred for each vehicle used. A column generation algorithm embedded in a branch-and-bound framework is proposed. The column generation pricing subproblem required a specific elementary shortest path problem with resource constraints algorithm to address the possibility for each vehicle performing multiple routes per day and to address the need to determine the workdays start time within the planning horizon. To make the algorithm efficient, a constructive heuristic and a learning metaheuristic algorithm based on tabu search were also developed. Both were used on branch-and-bound tree nodes to generate a good initial solution to the linear restricted master problem; particularly, to find a good initial primal bound to the branch-and-bound tree.