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New Lower Bounds On The Number of Vehicles For The Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

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38 views2 pages

New Lower Bounds On The Number of Vehicles For The Vehicle Routing Problem With Time Windows

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Ali A
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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New Lower Bounds on the Number of Vehicles

for the Vehicle Routing Problem


with Time Windows

Sohaib Afifi, Rym Nesrine Guibadj, and Aziz Moukrim

Université de Technologie Compiègne


Laboratoire Heudiasyc, UMR 7253 CNRS, 60205 Compiègne, France
{sohaib.afifi,rym-nesrine.guibadj,aziz.moukrim}@hds.utc.fr

Abstract. The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows


(VRPTW) consists in determining the routing plan of vehicles with iden-
tical capacity in order to supply the demands of a set of customers with
predefined time windows. This complex multi-constrained problem has
been widely studied due to its industrial, economic and environmental
implications. In this work, we are interested in defining the number of
vehicles needed to visit all the customers. This objective is very impor-
tant to evaluate the fixed costs for operating the fleet. In this paper, we
provide an analysis of several lower bounds based on incompatibility be-
tween customers and on vehicle capacity constraints. We also develop an
adaptation of Energetic Reasoning algorithm for VRPTW with a lim-
ited fleet. The proposed approach focuses on some time-intervals and
exploits time constraints, incompatibility graph and bin packing models
in order to obtain new valid lower bounds for the fleet size. Experiments
conducted on the standard benchmarks show that our algorithms outper-
form the classical lower bound techniques and give the minimum number
of vehicles for 339 out of 468 instances.

Keywords: vehicle routing, time windows, lower bounds, energetic rea-


soning.

1 Introduction

In today’s business world, transportation costs become a major share of the total
logistic expenses of companies. That is why many companies try to improve their
transportation by using rational manners and effective tools. The objective of
these problems is to make a vehicle scheduling strategy in order to minimize
the number of routes and the corresponding total travel distance or cost. In the
literature such problems are referred to as routing problems.
The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) [10] is among the
most studied variants of routing problems due its wide range of applications.
Common examples are newspaper delivery, beverage and food delivery, commer-
cial and industrial waste collection [13]. In VRPTW, a set of customers must

H. Simonis (Ed.): CPAIOR 2014, LNCS 8451, pp. 422–437, 2014.



c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
New Lower Bounds on the Number of Vehicles 423

be served by a fleet of vehicles located in a single depot. A quantity of goods


should be delivered to each customer whose service takes an amount of time.
Each customer is associated with a time window that represents the interval of
time when the customer is available to receive the service. This means that if the
vehicle arrives too soon, it should wait until the opening of the time window to
serve the customer while too late arrival is not allowed. Since deliveries cannot
be split, a customer must be served by a single vehicle. All vehicles are identical
and have a maximum capacity Q. The aim is to plan the minimal number of
routes starting and ending in a unique depot in order to serve all the customers
while respecting all the time windows and capacity constraints.
VRPTW was first introduced by Solomon [25]. Both exact and heuristic algo-
rithms have been proposed to solve VRPTW. Most of the exact methods focus
on the variant of the problem where the number of available vehicles is not fixed.
A review on the exact methods up to 2002 is reported in [7]. Kallehauge in [17]
gave a detailed analysis of existing formulations. More recently, Baldacci et al.
[3] reviewed mathematical formulations, relaxations and recent exact methods.
They reported the computational comparison between the methods proposed in
[15], [8] and [2] that are considered as the most effective exact methods in the
literature. These approaches have significantly improved the quality of the lower
bounds for instances with up to 100 customers. The key factor of their success
is the effective combination between the set partitioning formulation and the
column generation based algorithms.
Since, VRPTW is an NP-Hard problem [21], the computational times for exact
methods can be very high, even for instances with a moderate size. This has been
the motivation for some researches to focus on approximate methods. It is worth
pointing out that the literature concerning VRPTW is split according to the
objective considered. While exact methods usually minimize the total traveled
distance, most heuristics consider a hierarchical objective which first minimizes
the number of vehicles used and then the total distance. Thus, a solution that
employs fewer vehicles is always better than a one using more, even if its total
traveled distance is worse. A good survey of heuristic methods is reported in the
papers of Bräysy and Gendreau [5] [6]. Among the best performing heuristics
are the hybrid genetic algorithm of [16], the column generation heuristic of [1]
and the memetic algorithm of [20]. A new optimization framework was later
developed by Ursani et al. [27] for the distance minimization objective only.
This framework is an iterative procedure between optimization and deterioration
phases and uses a genetic algorithm as an optimization methodology. In the
recent paper of Vidal et al. [28], a hybrid genetic solver is developed to deal
with a large class of time-constrained vehicle routing problem. A third stream of
research focuses on solving VRPTW as a multi-objective problem in which both
vehicles and cost are considered depending on the needs of the user [26] [24].
The goal of this paper is to use scheduling methods via Energetic Reason-
ing in order to develop new lower bounding procedures for VRPTW. This is
mainly based on constraint propagation concept. The objective is to reduce the
computational effort by removing some values from the variables of the problem

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