Establishing family relationships, such as parentage and sibling relationships, can be extremely important in biological research, especially in wild species, as they are often key to understanding evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral processes. Because it is often not possible to determine familial relationships from field observations alone, the reconstruction of sibling relationships oft...

The vehicle routing problem with simultaneous distribution and collection (VRPSDC) is the variation of the capacitated vehicle routing problem that arises when the distribution of goods from a depot to a set of customers and the collection of waste from the customers to the depot must be performed by the same vehicles of limited capacity and the customers can be visited in any order. We study h...

Despite recent successful real-world deployments of Stackelberg Security Games (SSGs), scale-up remains a fundamental challenge in this field. The latest techniques do not scale-up to domains where multiple defenders must coordinate time-dependent joint activities. To address this challenge, this paper presents two branch-and-price algorithms for solving SSGs, SMARTO and SMARTH , with three nov...

We define the timetable constrained distance minimization problem (TCDMP) which is a sports scheduling problem applicable for tournaments where the total travel distance must be minimized. The problem consists of finding an optimal home-away assignment when the opponents of each team in each time slot are given. We present an integer programming, a constraint programming formulation and describ...

Given a fleet of vehicles assigned to a single depot, the vehicle routing problem with time windows (vrptw) consists of determining a set of feasible vehicle routes to deliver goods to a set of customers while minimizing, first, the number of vehicles used and, second, total distance traveled. A large number of heuristic approaches for the vrptw have been proposed in the literature. In this pap...

The School Bus Routing Problem (SBRP), a generalization of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem, involves the routing, planning, and scheduling of public school bus transportation. The problem can be divided into several subproblems, including bus stop selection, assigning students to buses, and determining the bus routes. This work presents an exact branch-and-price framework for the SBRP, w...

The multi-activity multi-task shift scheduling problem consists in assigning interruptible activities and uninterruptible tasks to a set of employees in order to satisfy a demand function. In this paper, we consider the personalized variant of the problem where the employees have different qualifications, preferences, and availabilities. We present a branch-and-price algorithm to solve this pro...

We consider a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with deterministic orders in two periods from a set of stores. Orders in period 1(2) can be postponed(advanced) to the other period but any diversion from the initial orders incurs a penalty. From the perspective of a Logistics Service Provider (LSP), such diversions could be beneficial if savings in the routing costs outweigh the penalties. So could ...

Development of a Branch and Price Approach Involving Vertex Cloning to Solve the Maximum Weighted Independent Set Problem. (December 2004) Sandeep Sachdeva, B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Wilbert E. Wilhelm We propose a novel branch-and-price (B&P) approach to solve the maximum weighted independent set problem (MWISP). Our approach uses cl...

In this paper, we consider tactical planning for a class of the multi-period vehicle routing problem (MPVRP). This problem involves optimizing daily product collections from several production locations over a given planning horizon. In this context, a single vehicle routing plan for the whole horizon must be prepared, and the seasonal variations in the producers' supplies must be taken into ac...