A column generation approach for a multi-attribute vehicle routing problem

In this paper, we consider a multi-attribute vehicle routing problem derived from a real-life milk collection system. This problem is characterized by the presence of a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, multiple depots, and several resource constraints. A branch-and-price methodology is proposed to tackle the problem. In this methodology, different branching strategies, adapted to the special structure of the problem, are implemented and compared. The computational results show that the branch-and-price algorithm performs well in terms of solution quality and computational efficiency.