A Branch-and-Price Algorithm for Combined Location and Routing Problems Under Capacity Restrictions

We investigate the problem of simultaneously determining the location of facilities and the design of vehicle routes to serve customer demands under vehicle and facility capacity restrictions. We present a set-partitioning-based formulation of the problem and study the relationship between this formulation and the graph-based formulations that have been used in previous Studies of this problem. We describe a branch-and-price algorithm based on the set-partitioning formulation and discuss computational experience with both exact and heuristic variants of this algorithm.