Melchiori, A. and Sgalambro, A. orcid.org/0000-0002-0052-4950 (2018) A matheuristic approach for the quickest multicommodity k-splittable flow problem. Computers and Operations Research, 92. pp. 111-129. ISSN 0305-0548
Abstract
The literature on k-splittable flows, see Baier et al. (2002), provides evidence on how controlling the number of used paths enables practical applications of flows optimization in many real-world contexts. Such a modeling feature has never been integrated so far in Quickest Flows, a class of optimization problems suitable to cope with situations such as emergency evacuations, transportation planning and telecommunication systems, where one aims to minimize the makespan, i.e. the overall time needed to complete all the operations, see Pascoal et al. (2006). In order to bridge this gap, a novel optimization problem, the Quickest Multicommodity k-Splittable Flow Problem (QMCkSFP) is introduced in this paper. The problem seeks to minimize the makespan of transshipment operations for given demands of multiple commodities, while imposing restrictions on the maximum number of paths for each single commodity. The computational complexity of this problem is analyzed, showing its NP-hardness in the strong sense, and an original Mixed-Integer Programming formulation is detailed. We propose a matheuristic algorithm based on a hybridized Very Large-Scale Neighborhood Search that, utilizing the presented mathematical formulation, explores multiple search spaces to solve efficiently large instances of the QMCkSFP. High quality computational results obtained on benchmark test sets are presented and discussed, showing how the proposed matheuristic largely outperforms a state-of-the-art heuristic scheme frequently adopted in path-restricted flow problems.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 Elsevier. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Computers & Operations Research. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Quickest flow; k-splittable flow; Matheuristics; Flows over time; Multicommodity |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Jan 2018 14:42 |
Last Modified: | 12 Apr 2024 14:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.cor.2017.12.012 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:125988 |
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