A wide spectrum of “real world” problems, such as vehicle routing, machine and crew scheduling, facility location, portfolio analysis, electricity generation planning, and communication and transportation network design, demands the use of combinatorial optimization methods. By a combinatorial optimization problem, we mean a program where a linear or nonlinear objective function must be optimiz...

In most vehicle routing and crew scheduling applications solved by column generation, the subproblem corresponds to a shortest path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC) or one of its variants. This chapter proposes a classification and a generic formulation for the SPPRCs, briefly discusses complex modeling issues involving resources, and presents the most commonly used SPPRC solution meth...

In this paper, we develop and discuss several distance measures for permutation type representations of solutions of combinatorial optimisation problems. The problems discussed include single-machine and multiple-machine scheduling problems, the travelling salesman problem, vehicle routing problems, and many others. The distance measures are based on the edit distance. We introduce several exte...

In most vehicle routing and crew scheduling applications solved by column generation, the subproblem corresponds to a shortest path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC) or one of its variants. This paper proposes a classification and a generic formulation for the SPPRCs, briefly discusses complex modeling issues involving resources, and presents the most commonly used SPPRC solution method...

The Technician Routing and Scheduling Problem (TRSP) consists in routing staff to serve requests for service, taking into account time windows, skills, tools, and spare parts. Typical applications include maintenance operations and staff routing in telecoms, public utilities, and in the health care industry. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the TRSP, discuss its relation with th...

Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW) is a well known NP hard combinatorial scheduling optimization problem in which minimum number of routes have to be determined to serve all the customers within their specified time windows. Different analytic and heuristic approaches have been tried to solve such problems. The proposed hybrid algorithm uses ant colony system as well as random se...

the vehicle routing problem with backhauls (vrpb) as an extension of the classical vehicle routing prob-lem (vrp) attempts to define a set of routes which services both linehaul customers whom product are to be delivered and backhaul customers whom goods need to be collected. a primary objective for the problem usually is minimizing the total distribution cost. most real-life problems have othe...

customer service level is of prime importance in today competitive world and has various dimensions with delivery quality being one of the most important ones. delivery quality has several parameters such as deliver time window options, time window size, etc. in this paper we focus on one of these parameters, namely time window setting. it has a direct impact upon customer satisfaction and busi...

The vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) as an extension of the classical vehicle routing prob-lem (VRP) attempts to define a set of routes which services both linehaul customers whom product are to be delivered and backhaul customers whom goods need to be collected. A primary objective for the problem usually is minimizing the total distribution cost. Most real-life problems have othe...

The vehicle routing problem with the capacity constraints was considered in this paper. It is quite difficult to achieve an optimal solution with traditional optimization methods by reason of the high computational complexity for large-scale problems. Consequently, new heuristic or metaheuristic approaches have been developed to solve this problem. In this paper, we constructed a new heuristic ...