• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 2005.10a
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• pp.57-78
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• 2005

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is to determine a set of feasible vehicle routes, one for each vehicle, such that each customer is visited exactly once and the total distance travelled by the vehicles is minimized. A feasible route is defined as a simple circuit including the depot such that the total demand of the customers in the route does not exceed the vehicle capacity. While there have been significant advances recently in exact solution methodology, the VRP is not a well solved problem. We find most approaches still relying on the branch and bound method. These approaches employ various methodologies to compute a lower bound on the optimal value. We introduce a new modelling approach, termed route-splitting, for the VRP that allows us to address problems whose size is beyond the current computational range of set-partitioning models. The route-splitting model splits each vehicle route into segments, and results in more tractable subproblems. Lifting much of the burden of solving combinatorially hard subproblems, the route-splitting approach puts more weight on the LP master problem, Recent breakthroughs in solving LP problems (Nemhauser, 1994) bode well for our approach. Lower bounds are computed on five symmetric VRPs with up to 199 customers, and eight asymmetric VRPs with up to 70 customers. while it is said that the exact methods developed for asymmetric instances have in general a poor performance when applied to symmetric ones (Toth and Vigo, 2002), the route splitting approach shows a competent performance of 93.5% on average in the symmetric VRPs. For the asymmetric ones, the approach comes up with lower bounds of 97.6% on average. The route-splitting model can deal with asymmetric cost matrices and non-identical vehicles. Given the ability of the route-splitting model to address a wider range of applications and its good performance on asymmetric instances, we find the model promising and valuable for further research.