6533b86efe1ef96bd12cc74d

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Bidirectional labeling for solving vehicle routing and truck driver scheduling problems

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Abstract This paper studies the vehicle routing and truck driver scheduling problem where routes and schedules must comply with hours of service regulations for truck drivers. It presents a backward labeling method for generating feasible schedules and shows how the labels generated with the backward method can be combined with labels generated by a forward labeling method. The bidirectional labeling is embedded into a branch-and-price-and-cut approach and evaluated for hours of service regulations in the United States and the European Union. Computational experiments show that the resulting bidirectional branch-and-price-and-cut approach is significantly faster than unidirectional counterparts and previous approaches.