Abstract
Column generation techniques have become a widely used technique to successfully solve large (integer) linear programs. One of the keys to obtaining a practically efficient algorithm is to have a fast method to limit the pricing of new columns to a small set.
We study a large scale real-world vehicle dispatching problem with soft time windows which can be modeled as an integer linear program of set partitioning type. We develop a new pruning scheme based on matchings in order to speed up the branch-and-bound enumeration in the column generation process. Computational results on real-world data illustrate the effectiveness of the new pruning scheme.
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Westphal, S., Krumke, S.O. Pruning in column generation for service vehicle dispatching. Ann Oper Res 159, 355–371 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-007-0275-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-007-0275-0