A Location Based Heuristic for General Routing Problems

Operations Research · 1995 · Volume 43 · Issue 4

Abstract

We present a general framework for modeling routing problems based on formulating them as a traditional location problem called the capacitated concentrator location problem. We apply this framework to two classical routing problems: the capacitated vehicle routing problem and the inventory routing problem. In the former case, the heuristic is proven to be asymptotically optimal for any distribution of customer demands and locations. Computational experiments show that the heuristic performs well for both problems and, in most cases, outperforms all published heuristics on a set of standard test problems.

Keywords

analysis of algorithms, suboptimal algorithms, programming, integer, relaxation, subgradient, transportation, vehicle routing

Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.