A branch-and-bound approach for a Vehicle Routing Problem with Customer Costs

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Contributors

Abstract

An important aspect in railway maintenance management is the scheduling of tamping actions in which two aspects need to be considered: first, the reduction of travel costs for crews and machinery; and second, the reduction of time-dependent costs caused by bad track condition. We model the corresponding planning problem as a Vehicle Routing Problem with additional customer costs. Due to the particular objective function, this kind of Vehicle Routing Problem is harder to solve with conventional methods. Therefore, we develop a branch-and-bound approach based on a partition and permutation model. We present two branching strategies, the first appends one job at the end of a route in each branching step and the second includes one job inside a route in each branching step; and analyze their pros and cons. Furthermore, different lower bounds for the customer costs and the travel costs are defined and compared. The performance of the branch-and-bound method is analyzed and compared with a commercial solver.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number100003
Number of pages11
JournalEURO Journal on Computational Optimization
Volume9
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85103686682

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Subject groups, research areas, subject areas according to Destatis

Keywords

  • Branch-and-bound, Customer costs, Railway maintenance scheduling, Vehicle Routing Problem