No label defined (Q4955266)

The paper presents a nice survey of the deterministic vehicle routing and crew scheduling problems. What's more they give a unified framework for studying both problems. The paper provides important contributions on both the modelling and algorithmic dimensions. On the modelling level, it presents a general model which integrates all the different time constrained vehicle routing and crew scheduling problem types examined so far. At the algorithmic level, the paper presents a branch and bound framework to solve the nonlinear multi-commodity network flow models in this class. It shows that a variety of strategies and algorithms can be utilized for the computation of lower bounds and for devising branching schemes. The lower bounds are derived by using a decomposition approach. The paper permits to see the variety of specialized dynamic programming algorithms that have been developed to solve these and more general single commodity problems and some of the aspects which have not yet received attention. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0933.00021].