| Article ID: | iaor19992942 |
| Country: | United States |
| Volume: | 46 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Start Page Number: | 75 |
| End Page Number: | 89 |
| Publication Date: | Feb 1999 |
| Journal: | Naval Research Logistics |
| Authors: | Laporte Gilbert, Langevin Andr, Mbaraga Pontien |
| Keywords: | bin packing |
This article describes a heuristic and two exact algorithms for several classes of vehicle routing problems defined on tree networks. These include capacitated and time-constrained vehicle routing problems. One of the exact algorithms is based on the computation of bin packing lower bounds. The other uses column generation. The first algorithm performs better on problems containing small customer demands and in which all vehicles are identical. Otherwise, the second algorithm is more powerful and more versatile.