Branch‐and‐cut algorithms for the vehicle routing problem with trailers and transshipments

This article studies the vehicle routing problem with trailers and transshipments (VRPTT), a practically relevant, but challenging, generalization of the classical vehicle routing problem. The article makes three contributions: (i) Building on a nontrivial network representation, two mixed‐integer programming formulations for the VRPTT are proposed. (ii) Based on these formulations, five different branch‐and‐cut algorithms are developed and implemented. (iii) The computational behavior of the algorithms is analyzed in an extensive computational study, using a large number of test instances designed to resemble real‐world VRPTTs.