Network Flow Optimization with Minimum Quantities

Hans Georg Seedig ()
Additional contact information
Hans Georg Seedig: Technische Universität München

A chapter in Operations Research Proceedings 2010, 2011, pp 295-300 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Economies of scale often appear as decreasing marginal costs, but may also occur as a constraint that at least a minimum quantity should be produced or nothing at all. Taking the latter into account can support decisions about keeping a production site, setting up a new one, establishing new routes in logistics network, and many more. In our work, we define the corresponding problem Minimum Cost Network Flow with Minimum Quantities and prove its computational hardness. Following that, we devise a tailored Branch-&-Bound algorithm with an efficient update step that usually affects only small parts of the network. Experiments are conducted on real problems and artificial networks. In our results, the update step made the inevitable but well-studied subproblem of the initial computation of a minimum cost network flow problem taking most of the actual total running time. As our method does also compare favorably with a heuristic algorithm that has been implemented before, we recommend it for practical use.

Keywords: Marginal Cost; Minimum Quantity; Mixed Integer Linear Program; Network Flow; Residual Network (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:oprchp:978-3-642-20009-0_47

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783642200090

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-20009-0_47

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Operations Research Proceedings from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().