Engineering Commons^™

An Empirical Study Of Mixed Integer Programming Formulations Of The Backhaul Profit Maximization Problem, Yulan Bai, Eli V. Olinick

Operations Research and Engineering Management

Solving an instance of the Backhaul Profit Maximization Problem (BPMP) requires simultaneously solving two problems: (1) determining how to route an empty delivery vehicle back from its current location to its depot by a scheduled arrival time, and (2) selecting a profit-maximizing subset of delivery requests between various locations on the route subject to the vehicle's capacity. We propose and test a series of enhancements to the node-arc and triples mixed integer programming formulations of BPMP found in the literature and develop a multi-criteria Composite Index Method (CIM) to evaluate the results. We find that CPLEX takes 5 to 34 …