A branch-and-cut-and-price approach for the capacitated m-ring-star problem

The capacitated m-ring-star problem is a variant of the classical one-depot capacitated vehicle routing problem in which a customer is either on a route or is connected to another customer or to some Steiner point present in a route. We develop a new exact algorithm for this problem using a branch-and-cut-and-price approach and compare its performance with that of a branch-and-cut algorithm proposed earlier in the literature. Computational results show that the new algorithm outperforms the branch-and-cut one in many instance classes. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.