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A Branch and Price Algorithm for the Two-Agent Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

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Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications (ICIC 2024)

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Abstract

In this paper, a two-agent heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem with time windows (TAHF_VRPTW) is considered. The objective of the first agent is to minimize the total tardiness and the objective of the second agent is to minimize the total transportation cost. A new mixed integer programming model (MILP) is built for this problem, and then a new branch and price algorithm (NBAPA) is proposed to address it. In the NBAPA, a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to construct the initial columns, and a label algorithm is designed to exactly solve sub-problems. If the optimal solution obtained by column generation contains real elements, this solution should be used for branch operation. Extensive computational experiments are conducted on the Solomon benchmark instances. The results show that within the specified time, compared with the standard BAP algorithm (i.e., the BAP without using GA to generate initial columns), the NBAPA can reduce the computation time by an average of 28.32% and the average number of branches by 42.29%.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62173169 and 72201115) and the Basic Research Key Project of Yunnan Province (202201AS070030).

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Correspondence to Rong Hu .

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Li, J., Yu, NK., Hu, R., Zhang, ZQ. (2024). A Branch and Price Algorithm for the Two-Agent Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. In: Huang, DS., Zhang, X., Chen, W. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Computing Technology and Applications. ICIC 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14862. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5578-3_35

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-5578-3_35

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