Truckload carriers are constantly faced with the problem of shipping full truckloads of goods at minimum cost between pairs of cities or customers, using a fleet of trucks located at one or more depots. In this paper, a new branch-and-bound algorithm for solving an integer-programming formulation of this vehicle-routing problem (VRP) with full truckloads is developed. The algorithm also takes into consideration the time-window constraints and waiting costs. The resulting efficiency, validated by computational tests on random problems, is due to a column-generation scheme that exploits the special structure of the problem to solve the linear-programming relaxation problems that arise at the nodes.
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Arunapuram et al. (2003) studied this question.
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