Integer Programming Approach to the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem

복수 차량 유형에 대한 차량경로문제의 정수계획 해법

We consider the heterogeneous fleet vehicle routing problem (HVRP), a variant of the classical vehicle routing problem (VRP). The HVRP differs from the classical VRP in that it deals with a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles having various capacities, fixed costs, and variables costs. Therefore the HVRP is to find the fleet composition and a set of routes with minimum total cost. We give an integer programming formulation of the problem and propose an algorithm to solve it. Although the formulation has exponentially many variables, we can efficiently solve the linear programming relaxation of it by using the column generation technique. To generate profitable columns we solve a shortest path problem with capacity constraints using dynamic programming. After solving the linear programming relaxation, we apply a branch-and-bound procedure. We test the proposed algorithm on a set of benchmark instances. Test results show that the algorithm gives best-known solutions to almost all instances.