Article ID: | iaor2005208 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 37 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 170 |
End Page Number: | 182 |
Publication Date: | May 2003 |
Journal: | Transportation Science |
Authors: | Solow D., Mathur K., Arunapuram S. |
Truckload carriers are constantly faced with the problem of shipping full truckloads of goods at minimum cost between pairs of cities or customers, using a fleet of trucks located at one or more depots. In this paper, a new branch-and-bound algorithm, for solving an integer-programming formulation of this vehicle-routing problem with full truckloads is developed. The algorithm also takes into consideration the time-window constraints and waiting costs. The resulting efficiency, validated by computational tests on random problems, is due to a column-generation scheme that exploits the special structure of the problem to solve the linear-programming relaxation problems that arise at the nodes.