In many practical cases one has to choose an arrangement of different objects so that they are compatible. Whenever the compatibility of the objects can be checked by a pair-wise comparison the problem can be moddeled using the graph-theoretic notion of cliques.

This paper introduces a special kind of multi-depot pickup and delivery problem. In contrast to the general pickup and delivery problem (GPDP, see e.g. [19,31]) all requests have to be picked up at or delivered to one central location which has the function of a hub or consolidation point. In...

The ongoing rise in e-commerce comes along with an increasing number of first-time delivery failures due to the absence of the customer at the delivery location. Failed deliveries result in rework which in turn has a large impact on the carriers’ delivery cost. In the classical vehicle routing...

We consider a packing problem that arises in a direct-shipping system in the food and beverage industry: Trucks are the containers, and products to be distributed are the items. The packing is constrained by two independent quantities, weight (e.g., measured in kg) and volume (number of...

Transportnetzwerk-Design ist eines der bedeutenden Anwendungsfelder des Operations Research und der mathematischen Optimierung. Es birgt große Potentiale zur Kostenreduktion und zur Verbesserung der Service-Qualität. Insbesondere gilt dies für die Planung von großen Regelnetzen, bei denen...

Column generation (CG) models have several advantages over compact formulations, namely, they provide better LP bounds, may eliminate symmetry, and can hide non-linearities in their subproblems. However, users also encounter drawbacks in the form of slow convergency a.k.a. the tailing-off effect...

We present two new methods to stabilize column-generation algorithms for the Temporal Knapsack Problem (TKP). Caprara et al. [Caprara A, Furini F, and Malaguti E (2013) Uncommon Dantzig-Wolfe Reformulation for the Temporal Knapsack Problem. INFORMS J. on Comp. 25(3):560–571] were the first to...

The minimum tour duration problem (MTDP) is the variant of the traveling salesman problem with time windows, which consists of finding a time window-feasible Hamiltonian path minimizing the tour duration. We present a new effective dynamic programming (DP)-based approach for the MTDP. When...