A Scalable Heuristic for Pickup-and-Delivery of Splittable Loads and Its Application to Military Cargo-Plane Routing

This paper is motivated by a military cargo-plane routing problem which is a pickup-and-delivery problem in which load splits and node revisits are allowed (PDPLS). Although this recent evolution of a VRP-model enhances the efficiency of routing, a solution method is more of a challenge since the node revisits entail closed walks in modeling vehicle routes. For such a case, even a compact IP-formulation is not available and an effective method had been lacking until Nowak et al. (2008b) proposed a heuristic based on a tabu search. Their method provides very reasonable solu-tions as demonstrated by the experiments not only in their paper (Nowak et al., 2008b) but also in ours. However, the computation time seems intensive especially for the class of problems with dynamic transportation requests, including the military cargo-plane routing problem. This paper proposes a more scalable algorithm hybridizing a tabu search for pricing subproblem paused as a single-vehicle routing problem, with a column generation approach based on Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition. As tested on a wide variety of instances, our algorithm produces, in average, a solution of an equiva-lent quality in 10~20% of the computation time of the previous method.