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A column generation approach and new bounds for the car sequencing problem

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Abstract

The subject of the 2005 ROADEF challenge was a variation of the car scheduling problem based on the needs of the Renaultfactories. In this paper we revisit this problem to investigate how further contributions can be made in order to close the gap between exact and heuristic methods that exists for this problem. For the benchmark set used in the final round of the competition we report new lower bounds for 7 out of the 19 instances by using an improved ILP formulation of the problem. We also present a new column generation based exact method for solving the ILP problem which outperforms branch-and-bound in obtaining upper bounds for these problems.

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Notes

  1. http://challenge.roadef.org/.

  2. This definition of \(\alpha \) corrects a mistake in Benoist (2008), confirmed by the author.

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Acknowledgements

Roberto Asín’s research was funded by CONICYT, Chile, under FONDECYT project 11121220.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

    Eivind Jahren

  2. Computer Science Department, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile

    Roberto Asín Achá

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  1. Eivind Jahren
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  2. Roberto Asín Achá
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Correspondence to Eivind Jahren.

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Jahren, E., Achá, R.A. A column generation approach and new bounds for the car sequencing problem. Ann Oper Res 264, 193–211 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2663-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2663-4

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