Home health care routing and scheduling

Global optimization advances in Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming, MINLP, and Constrained Derivative-Free Optimization, CDFO

In this paper, we survey the literature on matheuristics proposed to solve vehicle routing problems. A matheuristic makes use of mathematical programming models in a heuristic framework. Matheuristics have been applied to several different routing problems and include a number of different approaches. We propose a classification in three classes of matheuristics: decomposition approaches, improvement heuristics and branch-and-price/column generation-based approaches. The contribution of this paper is to offer to researchers interested in routing problems a structured overview of the most successful ideas to combine heuristic schemes and mathematical programming models to obtain high quality solutions. Moreover, we analyze the state of the art and provide insights and hints for future research.

/pdf/a-survey-on-matheuristics-for-routing-problems-2n0okjoasm.pdf

A survey on matheuristics for routing problems

This paper proposes a crowdsource-enabled system for urban parcel relay and delivery. We consider cyclists and pedestrians as crowdsources who are close to customers and interested in relaying parcels with a truck carrier and undertaking jobs for the last-leg parcel delivery and the first-leg parcel pickup. The crowdsources express their interests in doing so by submitting bids to the truck carrier. The truck carrier then selects bids and coordinates crowdsources’ last-leg delivery (first-leg pickup) with its truck operations. The truck carrier's problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear program which simultaneously i) selects crowdsources to complete the last-leg delivery (first-leg pickup) between customers and selected points for crowdsource-truck relay; and ii) determines the relay points and truck routes and schedule. To solve the truck carrier problem, we first decompose the problem into a winner determination problem and a simultaneous pickup and delivery problem with soft time windows, and propose a Tabu Search based algorithm to iteratively solve the two subproblems. Numerical results show that this solution approach is able to yield close-to-optimum solutions with much less time than using off-the-shelf solvers. By adopting this new system, truck vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and total cost can be reduced compared to pure-truck delivery. The advantage of the system over pure-truck delivery is sensitive to factors such as penalty for servicing outside customers’ desired time windows, truck unit operating cost, time value of crowdsources, and the crowdsource mode.

Design and modeling of a crowdsource-enabled system for urban parcel relay and delivery

A Multi-Depot Two-Echelon Vehicle Routing Problem with Delivery Options Arising in the Last Mile Distribution

https://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~letocart/SURVEY.pdf

Minimal multicut and maximal integer multiflow: A survey

A matheuristic approach for solving a home health care problem

The multicommodity-ring location routing problem (MRLRP) studied in this paper is an NP-hard minimization problem arising in city logistics. The aim is to locate a set of urban distribution centers (UDCs) and to connect them via a ring in which massive flows of goods will circulate. Goods are transported from gates located outside the city to a UDC, and either join a second UDC through the ring before being delivered in electric vans to the final customers or are delivered directly to the customers from the first UDC. The reverse trip with pickup and transportation to the gates is also possible. A delivery service path starts at a particular UDC, then visits a subset of customers and ends at the same UDC, another UDC, or a self-service parking lot (SPL). A pickup route can start from an SPL or a UDC and ends at a UDC. The objective is to minimize the sum of the installation costs of the ring, flow transportation costs, and routing costs. The MRLRP belongs to the class of location-routing problems (LRP). W...

The Multicommodity-Ring Location Routing Problem

https://www.ime.usp.br/~juanguti/multicorte/costa.pdf

A greedy algorithm for multicut and integral multiflow in rooted trees

This paper presents a heuristic method based on column generation for the EDF (Electricite De France) long-term electricity production planning problem proposed as subject of the ROADEF/EURO 2010 Challenge. This is to our knowledge the first-ranked method among those methods based on mathematical programming, and was ranked fourth overall. The problem consists in determining a production plan over the whole time horizon for each thermal power plant of the French electricity company, and for nuclear plants, a schedule of plant outages which are necessary for refueling and maintenance operations. The average cost of the overall outage and production planning, computed over a set of demand scenarios, is to be minimized. The method proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, dates for outages are fixed once for all for each nuclear plant. Data are aggregated with a single average scenario and reduced time steps, and a set-partitioning reformulation of this aggregated problem is solved for fixing outage dates with a heuristic based on column generation. The pricing problem associated with each nuclear plant is a shortest path problem in an appropriately constructed graph. In the second stage, the reload level is determined at each date of an outage, considering now all scenarios. Finally, the production quantities between two outages are optimized for each plant and each scenario by solving independent linear programming problems.

Lucas Létocart

Papers

Minimal multicut and maximal integer multiflow: A survey

A matheuristic approach for solving a home health care problem

The Multicommodity-Ring Location Routing Problem

A greedy algorithm for multicut and integral multiflow in rooted trees

Solving the electricity production planning problem by a column generation based heuristic