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...

Abstract Despite ongoing automation efforts, most warehouses are still manually operated using a person-to-parts collection strategy. This process of collecting items of customer orders from different storage locations accounts for the majority of the operating costs of the warehouse. Hence,...

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...

Abstract For many variants of vehicle routing and scheduling problems solved by a branch-price-and-cut (BPC) algorithm, the pricing subproblem is an elementary shortest-path problem with resource constraints (SPPRC) typically solved by a dynamic-programming labeling algorithm. Solving the SPPRC...