The Pickup and Delivery Problem with Split Loads and Transshipments: A Branch-and-Cut Solution Approach

This paper addresses the design of routes for a fleet of vehicles serving customer requests. It is a pickup and delivery problem where each customer location can be visited several times, and load may be transshipped from one vehicle to another at specific locations. The aim is to minimize the sum of travel costs and transshipment costs. We present an arc-based mixed-integer formulation for the problem and propose a branch-and-cut algorithm for solving it. Extensive computational results illustrate the performance of the algorithm. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

Automated summary

This paper discusses the design of routes for a fleet of vehicles serving customer requests, targeting to minimize the sum of travel costs and transshipment costs. An arc-based mixed-integer formulation and a branch-and-cut algorithm are proposed and extensively tested to showcase the algorithm's performance.