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A branch-and-price algorithm for the windy rural postman problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2012

Hasan Murat Afsar ,
Nicolas Jozefowiez  and
Pierre Lopez
Hasan Murat Afsar
Affiliation:
Universitéde Technologie de Troyes (UTT), Institut Charles Delaunay, LOSI, 12 rue Marie Curie, 10010 Troyes, France. [email protected]
Nicolas Jozefowiez
Affiliation:
CNRS, LAAS, 7 avenue du Colonel Roche, 31077 Toulouse Cedex 4, France Université de Toulouse, INSA, LAAS, 31400 Toulouse, France
Pierre Lopez
Affiliation:
CNRS, LAAS, 7 avenue du Colonel Roche, 31077 Toulouse Cedex 4, France Université de Toulouse, LAAS, 31400 Toulouse, France
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Abstract

In this paper, we propose an exact solution method for the windy rural postman problem (WRPP). The motivation to study this problem comes from some real-life applications, such as garbage collecting in a predefined sector with hills, where the traversing or the servicing speed can change following the direction. We present a Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and a branch-and-price algorithm to solve the WRPP. To the best of our knowledge, Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition has never been used to solve that problem. The numerical results show that optimal solutions are found in a very reasonable amount of time on instances with up to 100 nodes and 180 edges.

Keywords

Branch-and-pricewindy rural postman problem
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Operations Research , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 353 - 364
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, ROADEF, SMAI, 2012

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