Refinements of the column generation process for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows is a generalization of the well known capacity constrained Vehicle Routing Problem. A homogeneous fleet of vehicles has to service a set of customers. The service of the customers can only start within a well-defined time interval denoted the time window. The objective is to determine routes for the vehicles that minimizes the accumulated cost (or distance). Currently the best approaches for determining optimal solutions are based on column generation and Branch-and-Bound, also known as Branch-and-Price. This paper presents two ideas for run-time improvements of the Branch-and-Price framework for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. Both ideas reveal a significant potential for run-time refinements when speeding up an exact approach without compromising optimality.