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Combining Exact Methods to Construct Effective Hybrid Approaches to Vehicle Routing

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Women in Industrial and Systems Engineering

Part of the book series: Women in Engineering and Science ((WES))

Abstract

This chapter proposes a new research direction whose viability is due to advances of computing technologies. It combines mixed integer and constraint programming in different ways in quest of effective search techniques. It uses exact approaches as approximate ones not only by imposing runtime and bounding limits, but also by relaxing the mathematical models in a non-classical way. For example, it augments the model with “non-traditional constraints,” substitutes hard constraints with “easier” ones, and limits the search space to neighborhoods that may contain the optimum. The resulting search techniques offer industries a competitive edge by identifying near-optimal solutions to complex problems and providing them, at no investment cost, with feasible/directly implementable solutions to realistic instances (not to their abstract/simplified form). This chapter illustrates such benefits on a very difficult industrial engineering problem: vehicle routing with multiple time windows. This problem has a compounded difficulty. It involves two NP-hard subproblems: routing and scheduling. Solving its real-life instances is almost impossible. However, good quality solutions may be obtained in reasonable times via the proposed technique.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics and Operations Research, College of Science, Kuwait University, Kuwait City, Kuwait

    Rym M’Hallah

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  1. Rym M’Hallah
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Correspondence to Rym M’Hallah .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA

    Alice E. Smith

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M’Hallah, R. (2020). Combining Exact Methods to Construct Effective Hybrid Approaches to Vehicle Routing. In: Smith, A. (eds) Women in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Women in Engineering and Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11866-2_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11866-2_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-11865-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-11866-2

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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