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Vehicle Routing and Scheduling with Full Truckloads

Manugistics Inc., Wayne, Pennsylvania 19087
Department of Operations, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
Department of Operations, Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
sundar{at}manu.com
kxm6{at}po.cwru.edu
dxs8{at}po.cwru.edu

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 (VRP) 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.

History: Received: August 1997; revised: April 2000; accepted: January 2002.