Article ID: | iaor20011061 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 32 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 12 |
End Page Number: | 29 |
Publication Date: | Feb 1998 |
Journal: | Transportation Science |
Authors: | Potvin Jean-Yves, Gendreau Michel, Pesant Gilles, Rousseau J.M. |
Keywords: | programming: branch and bound |
This paper presents a constraint logic programming model for the traveling salesman problem with time windows which yields an exact branch-and-bound optimization algorithm without any restrictive assumption on the time windows. Unlike dynamic programming approaches whose performance relies heavily on the degree of discretization applied to the data, our algorithm does not suffer from such space-complexity issues. The data-driven mechanism at its core more fully exploits pruning rules developed in operations research by using them not only a priori but also dynamically during the search. Computational results are reported and comparisons are made with both exact and heuristic algorithms. On Solomon's well-known test bed, our algorithm is instrumental in achieving new best solutions for some of the problems in set RC2 and strengthens the presumption of optimality for the best known solutions to the problems in set C2.