Abstract
In this paper, a fast heuristic approach is proposed for solving the multiple depot vehicle scheduling problem (MDVSP), a well-known NP-hard problem. The heuristic is based on a two stage procedure. The first one applies two state space reduction procedures towards reducing the problem complexity. One procedure is based on the solutions of the single-depot vehicle scheduling for each depot, while the other uses the solution of a relaxed formulation of the MDVSP, in which a vehicle can finish its task sequence in a different depot from where it started. Next, the reduced problem is solved by employing a truncated column generation approach. The heuristic approach has been implemented in several variants, through different combinations of the reduction procedures, and tested on a series of benchmark problems provided by Pepin et al. (J Sched 12:17–30, 2009). The heuristic variants found solutions with very narrow gaps (below 0.7 %, on average) to best-known solutions (Pepin et al., J Sched 12:17–30, 2009), decreasing the required CPU time by an overall average factor of 17 in comparison with reported results in the literature (Otsuki and Aihara, J Heuristics 1–19, 2014).
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The authors thank the two anonymous referees and the associate editor for their comments that greatly improved the quality of the paper. This research work was partially founded by CNPq, Brazil, grants 301453/2013-6 and 473033/2012-7.
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Guedes, P.C., Lopes, W.P., Rohde, L.R. et al. Simple and efficient heuristic approach for the multiple-depot vehicle scheduling problem. Optim Lett 10, 1449–1461 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-015-0944-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-015-0944-x