Computational results with a branch and cut code for the capacitated vehicle routing problem

The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) we consider in this paper consists in the optimization of the distribution of goods from a single depot to a given set of customers with known demand using a given number of vehicles of fixed capacity. There are many practical routing applications in the public sector such as school bus routing, pick up and mail delivery, and in the private sector such as the dispatching of delivery trucks. We present a Branch and Cut algorithm to solve the CVRP which is based in the partial polyhedral description of the corresponding polytope. The valid inequalities used in our method can ne found in Cornuejols and Harche (1993), Harche and Rinaldi (1991) and in Augerat and Pochet (1995). We concentrated mainly on the design of separation procedures for several classes of valid inequalities. The capacity constraints (generalized sub-tour eliminations inequalities) happen to play a crucial role in the development of a cutting plane algorithm for the CVRP. A large number of separation heuristics have been implemented and compared for these inequalities. There has been also implemented heuristic separation algorithms for other classes of valid inequalities that also lead to significant improvements: comb and extended comb inequalities, generalized capacity inequalities and hypo-tour inequalities. The resulting cutting plane algorithm has been applied to a set of instances taken from the literature and the lower bounds obtained are better than the ones previously known. Some branching strategies have been implemented to develop a Branch an Cut algorithm that has been able to solve large CVRP instances, some of them which had never been solved before. (authors). 32 refs., 3 figs., 10 tabs.