Branch-and-price-and-cut for the Split-collection Vehicle Routing   Problem with Time Windows and Linear Weight-related Cost
  This paper addresses a new vehicle routing problem that simultaneously involves time windows, split collection and linear weight-related cost, which is a generalization of the split delivery vehicle routing problem with time windows (SDVRPTW). This problem consists of determining least-cost vehicle routes to serve a set of customers while respecting the restrictions of vehicle capacity and time windows. The travel cost per unit distance is a linear function of the vehicle weight and the customer demand can be fulfilled by multiple vehicles. To solve this problem, we propose a exact branch-and-price-and-cut algorithm, where the pricing subproblem is a resource-constrained elementary least-cost path problem. We first prove that at least an optimal solution to the pricing subproblem is associated with an extreme collection pattern, and then design a tailored and novel label-setting algorithm to solve it. Computational results show that our proposed algorithm can handle both the SDVRPTW and our problem effectively. 
Zhixin Luo and Hu Qin and Wenbin Zhu and Andrew Lim
cs.DS