A Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Shift Time Limits

Irina Kupriyanova

AbstractIn this thesis a vehicle routing problem with time windows and shift time limits is investigated. An additional specific feature of the problem is a non homogeneous fleet with a limited number of vehicles of each type.

A two-phase solution method is developed and implemented. The first phase deals with construction of a large set of good quality routes. In the second phase a Lagrangian heuristic is used to solve a mixed set covering/packing problem where columns of the constraint matrix correspond to the routes generated in the first phase.

The developed solution approach is tested on a number of problems of different size. The computational results show that optimal solutions can be found for the set covering/packing problems of small size, i.e. 120 rows and up to 500 columns. As the problem size increases the performance of the Lagrangian heuristic becomes worse.
KeywordsVehicle routing, time windows, shift time limits, Lagrangian relaxation, set covering, set packing.
TypeMaster's thesis [Academic thesis]
Year2006
PublisherInformatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, DTU
AddressRichard Petersens Plads, Building 321, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
SeriesIMM-Thesis-2006-33
NoteSupervised by Jesper Larsen, IMM.
Electronic version(s)[pdf]
BibTeX data [bibtex]
IMM Group(s)Operations Research