Cumulative vehicle routing problem: A column generation approach

Abstract

Cumulative vehicle routing problems are a simplified model of fuel consumption in vehicle routing problems. Here we study computationally, an approach for constructing approximate solutions to cumulative vehicle routing problems based on rounding solutions to a linear program. The linear program is based on the set cover formulation, and is solved using column generation. The pricing sub-problem is solved using dynamic programming. Simulation results show that the simple scalable strategy computes solutions with cost close to the lower bound given by the linear programming relaxation.