A computational evaluation of a general branch-and-price framework for capacitated network location problems

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate a general framework for network location problems, based on column generation and branch-and-price. In particular we consider capacitated network location problems with single-source constraints. We consider several different network location models, by combining cardinality constraints, fixed costs, concentrator restrictions and regional constraints. Our general branch-and-price-based approach can be seen as a natural counterpart of the branch-and-cut-based commercial ILP solvers, with the advantage of exploiting the tightness of the lower bound provided by the set partitioning reformulation of network location problems. Branch-and-price and branch-and-cut are compared through an extensive set of experimental tests.