A priori optimization with recourse for the vehicle routing problem with hard time windows and stochastic service times

F. Errico, G. Desaulniers, M. Gendreau, W. Rei and L.-M. Rousseau

European Journal of Operational Research, 2016, vol. 249, issue 1, 55-66

Abstract: The vehicle routing problem with hard time windows and stochastic service times (VRPTW-ST) introduced by Errico et al. (2013) in the form of a chance-constrained model mainly differs from other vehicle routing problems with stochastic service or travel times considered in the literature by the presence of hard time windows. This makes the problem extremely challenging. In this paper, we model the VRPTW-ST as a two-stage stochastic program and define two recourse policies to recover operations feasibility when the first stage plan turns out to be infeasible. We formulate the VRPTW-ST as a set partitioning problem and solve it by exact branch-cut-and-price algorithms. Specifically, we developed efficient labeling algorithms by suitably choosing label components, determining extension functions, and developing lower and upper bounds on partial route reduced cost to be used in the column generation step. Results on benchmark data show that our methods are able to solve instances with up to 50 customers for both recourse policies.

Keywords: Vehicle routing problem; Service time; Stochastic programming; A-priori optimization; Column generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221715006608
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:249:y:2016:i:1:p:55-66

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.07.027

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().