Formulations and valid inequalities for the heterogeneous vehicle routing problem

Abstract

We consider the vehicle routing problem where one can choose among vehicles with different costs and capacities to serve the trips. We develop six different formulations: the first four based on Miller-Tucker-Zemlin constraints and the last two based on flows. We compare the linear programming bounds of these formulations. We derive valid inequalities and lift some of the constraints to improve the lower bounds. We generalize and strengthen subtour elimination and generalized large multistar inequalities.