C&O Reading Group - Fernando Afonso

Monday, November 30, 2015 4:15 pm - 4:15 pm EST (GMT -05:00)

Title: A branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm for the pollution routing problem

Speaker: Fernando Afonso
Affiliation: Federal University of Itajuba
Room: MC 6486

Abstract: A classical combinatorial optimization problem is the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time-windows (VRPTW). In such problem, a fleet of
identical vehicles must visit customers to deliver goods such that the total amount of delivered goods is not more than the truck's capacity and each customer is served within its pre-specified time-window. The aim is to minimize the cost of visiting all customers exactly once. The Pollution Routing Problem (PRP) is a variant of the VRPTW where in addition to the routes, the speeds with which the vehicle will travel can also be determined. The main motivation in the PRP is that speeds will affect the amount of pollution that is generated. In fact, several models have been proposed to translate speeds into greenhouse gas emissions and further into dollar amounts. Using those models, the goal of the PRP then is to minimize the total dollar amount as a (nonlinear) function of the speeds and the routes. The goal of this talk is to introduce a Branch-and-cut-and-price algorithm for the PRP. We propose a dynamic programming algorithm to price out negative reduced cost routes that derives novel dominance rules in order to prune out unpromising labels and perform faster. Extensive computational experiments are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm.

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http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~deolivei/reading.htm