A Route-Splitting Approach to the Vehicle Routing Problem

The column generation process for the set-partitioning model of the vehicle routing problem requires repeated solutions of column generation subproblems which has a combinatorial structure similar to that of the traveling salesman problem. This limits the size of the problem that can be addressed. We introduce a new modeling approach, termed route-splitting, which splits each vehicle route into segments, and results in more tractable subproblems. A lower bounding scheme that yields an updated bound at each iteration of the column generation process is developed. Implementation issues, including a technique of controlling columns in the master problem, are explored. Lower bounds are computed on standard benchmark problems with up to 199 customers.