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A Constraint Programming Approach for the Traveling Purchaser Problem

  • Conference paper
Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2012)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 7514))

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Abstract

We present a novel approach to the Traveling Purchaser Problem (TPP), based on constraint programming and Lagrangean relaxation. The TPP is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem involved in many real-world applications. Given a set of markets providing products at different prices and a list of products to be purchased, the problem is to determine the route minimizing the sum of the traveling and purchasing costs. We propose in this paper an efficient approach when the number of markets visited in an optimal solution is low. We believe that the real-world applications of this problem often assume a bounded number of visits when they involve a physical routing. It is an actual requirement from our industrial partner which is developing a web application to help their customers’ shopping planning. The approach is tested on academic benchmarks. It proves to be competitive with a state of the art branch-and-cut algorithm and can provide in some cases new optimal solutions for instances with up to 250 markets and 200 products.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. G-SCOP, Université de Grenoble / Grenoble-INP / UJF-Grenoble 1 / CNRS, France

    Hadrien Cambazard & Bernard Penz

Authors
  1. Hadrien Cambazard
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  2. Bernard Penz
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. DEIS Universitá di Bologna, V.le Risorgimento, 2, 40136, Bologna, Italy

    Michela Milano

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Cambazard, H., Penz, B. (2012). A Constraint Programming Approach for the Traveling Purchaser Problem. In: Milano, M. (eds) Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. CP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7514. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33558-7_53

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33558-7_53

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33557-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33558-7

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