Hadi Karimi, - Department of Industrial Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic
Abbas Seifi

One of the basic models in reverse logistics is the vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and delivery (VRPSPD). In this problem a fleet of vehicles with limited capacity should service some customers by delivering required goods and collecting used products in the same time. We have proposed a column generation algorithm for this problem based on the analytic center cutting plane method (ACCPM). This procedure gives us an efficient lower bound which could be used in more general frameworks like branch-and-price. This algorithm is compared with classical approach of column generation and the results demonstrate its superiority in stability and computational time

reverse logistics, vehicle routing, column generation, analytic center cutting plane methods