A three-phase matheuristic for capacitated multi-commodity fixed-cost network design with design-balance constraints

This paper proposes a three-phase matheuristic solution strategy for the capacitated multi-commodity fixed-cost network design problem with design-balance constraints. The proposed matheuristic combines exact and neighbourhood-based methods. Tabu search and restricted path relinking meta-heuristics cooperate to generate as many feasible solutions as possible. The two meta-heuristics incorporate new neighbourhoods, and computationally efficient exploration procedures. The feasible solutions generated by the two procedures are then used to identify an appropriate part of the solution space where an exact solver intensifies the search. Computational experiments on benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm finds good solutions to large-scale problems in a reasonable amount of time. D. M. Vu Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada D. M. Vu · M. Toulouse Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Réseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport (CIRRELT), Université de Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada T. G. Crainic Département management et technologie, École des sciences de la gestion, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada T. G. Crainic (B) Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur les Réseaux d’Entreprise, la Logistique et le Transport (CIRRELT), Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] M. Toulouse Department of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA