A New Exact Algorithm to Solve the Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows and Limited Duration

This article tackles the multi-trip vehicule routing problem with time windows and limited duration. A trip is a timed route such that a succession of trips can be assigned to one vehicle. We provide a two-phase exact algorithm to solve it. The first phase enumerates possible ordered lists of client matching trip maximum duration criterion. The second phase uses a Branch and Price scheme to generate and choose best set of trips to visit all customers. We propose a set covering formulation as the column generation master problem, where columns (variables) represent trips. The sub-problem selects appropriate timing for trips and has a pseudo-polynomial complexity. Computional results on Solomon's benchmarks are presented. The computional times obtained with our new algorithm are much lower than the ones obtained in the sole exact algorithm previously published on this problem.

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Additional Info

Field Value
Source https://hal-lirmm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/lirmm-00616667
Author Giroudeau, Rodolphe, Naud, Oliver, Hernandez, Florent, Feillet, Dominique
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 19, 2026, 21:48 (UTC)
Created May 19, 2026, 21:48 (UTC)
Identifier Report N°: RR-11023
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Methods, Algorithms for Operations REsearch (MAORE) ; Laboratoire d'Informatique de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM) ; Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université de Montpellier (UM)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Giroudeau, Rodolphe
date 2011-08-23T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 8da8d3c5-caec-4b6d-9fbd-1c0889ef0077
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2026-02-12T00:00:00
set_spec type:REPORT