Solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple routes exactly using a pseudo-polynomial model
Rita Macedo, Cláudio Alves, José Valério de Carvalho, François Clautiaux, Said Hanafi
European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 214, n.o 3, pp. 536-545, 2011

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we address a variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem called the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Multiple Routes. It considers that a given vehicle can be assigned to more than one route per planning period. We propose a new exact algorithm for this problem. Our algorithm is iterative and it relies on a pseudo-polynomial network flow model whose nodes represent time instants, and whose arcs represent feasible vehicle routes. This algorithm was tested on a set of benchmark instances from the literature. The computational results show that our method is able to solve more instances than the only other exact method described so far in the literature, and it clearly outperforms this method, in terms of computing time, in most of the cases.

BIBTEX ENTRY
@article{MacedoAlvesCarvalhoetalEJOR11,
author = {Rita Macedo and Cl{\'a}udio Alves and Jos{\'e} Val{\'e}rio de Carvalho and Fran\c{c}ois Clautiaux and Sa{\"i}d Hanafi},
title = {Solving the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple routes exactly using a pseudo-polynomial model},
journal = {European Journal of Operational Research},
volume = {214},
number = {3},
year = {2011},
pages = {536-545} }