Time constrained maximal covering salesman problem with weighted demands and partial coverage

In a routing framework, it may not be viable to visit every single customer separately due to resource limitations or efficiency concerns. In such cases, utilizing the notion of coverage; i.e., satisfying the demand of multiple customers by visiting a single customer location, may be advantageous. With this motivation, we study the time constrained maximal covering salesman problem (TCMCSP) in which the aim is to find a tour visiting a subset of customers so that the amount of demand covered within a limited time is maximized. We provide flow and cut formulations and derive valid inequalities. Since the connectivity constraints and the proposed valid inequalities are exponential in the size of the problem, we devise different branch-and-cut schemes. Computational experiments performed on a set of problem instances demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed valid inequalities in terms of strengthening the linear relaxation bounds as well as speeding up the solution procedure. Moreover, the results indicate the superiority of using a branch-and-cut methodology over a flow-based formulation. Finally, we discuss the relation between the problem parameters and the structure of optimal solutions based on the results of our experiments. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.