Mads Kehlet Jepsen

Subset-Row Inequalities Applied to the Vehicle-Routing Problem with Time Windows

This paper presents a branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm for the vehicle-routing problem with time windows. The standard Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition of the arc flow formulation leads to a set-partitioning problem as the master problem and an elementary shortest-path problem with resource constraints as the pricing problem. We introduce the subset-row inequalities, which are Chvatal-Gomory rank-1 cuts based on a subset of the constraints in the master problem. Applying a subset-row inequality in the master problem increases the complexity of the label-setting algorithm used to solve the pricing problem because an additional resource is added for each inequality. We propose a modified dominance criterion that makes it possible to dominate more labels by exploiting the step-like structure of the objective function of the pricing problem. Computational experiments have been performed on the Solomon benchmarks where we were able to close several instances. The results show that applying subset-row inequalities in the master problem significantly improves the lower bound and, in many cases, makes it possible to prove optimality in the root node.

A Branch-and-Cut Algorithm for the Symmetric Two-Echelon Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

This paper presents an exact method for solving the symmetric two-echelon capacitated vehicle routing problem, a transportation problem concerned with the distribution of goods from a depot to a set of customers through a set of satellite locations. The presented method is based on an edge flow model that is a relaxation and provides a valid lower bound. A specialized branching scheme is employed to obtain feasible solutions. Out of a test set of 93 instances the algorithm is able to solve 47 to optimality, surpassing previous exact algorithms.

A branch-and-cut algorithm for the capacitated profitable tour problem

This paper considers the Capacitated Profitable Tour Problem (CPTP) which is a special case of the Elementary Shortest Path Problem with Resource Constraints (ESPPRC). The CPTP belongs to the group of problems known as traveling salesman problems with profits. In CPTP each customer is associated with a profit and a demand and the objective is to find a capacitated tour (rooted in a depot node) that minimizes the total travel distance minus the profit of the visited customers. The CPTP can be recognized as the sub-problem in many column generation applications, where it is traditionally solved through dynamic programming. In this paper we present an alternative framework based on a formulation for the undirected CPTP and solved through branch-and-cut. Valid inequalities are presented among which we introduce a new family of inequalities for the CPTP denoted rounded multistar inequalities and we prove their validity. Computational experiments are performed on a set of instances known from the literature and a set of newly generated instances. The results indicate that the presented algorithm is highly competitive with the dynamic programming algorithms. In particular, we are able to solve instances with 800 nodes to optimality where the dynamic programming algorithms cannot solve instances with more than 200 nodes. Moreover dynamic programming and branch-and-cut complement each other well, giving us hope for solving more general problems through hybrid approaches. The paper is intended to serve as a platform for further development of branch-and-cut algorithms for CPTP hence also acting as a survey/tutorial.