@misc{BorndoerferSagnolSchlechteetal.2013, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Sagnol, Guillaume and Schlechte, Thomas and Swarat, Elmar}, title = {Optimal Toll Enforcement - an Integration of Vehicle Routing and Duty Rostering}, issn = {1438-0064}, doi = {10.1007/s10479-016-2152-1}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-45107}, year = {2013}, abstract = {We present the problem of planning mobile tours of inspectors on German motorways to enforce the payment of the toll for heavy good trucks. This is a special type of vehicle routing problem with the objective to conduct as good inspections as possible on the complete network. In addition, the crews of the tours have to be scheduled. Thus, we developed a personalized crew rostering model. The planning of daily tours and the rostering are combined in a novel integrated approach and formulated as a complex and large scale Integer Program. The paper focuses first on different requirements for the rostering and how they can be modeled in detail. The second focus is on a bicriterion analysis of the planning problem to find the balance between the control quality and the roster acceptance. On the one hand the tour planning is a profit maximization problem and on the other hand the rostering should be made in a employee friendly way. Finally, computational results on real-world instances show the practicability of our method.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{GrimmBorndoerferBushe2023, author = {Grimm, Boris and Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Bushe, Julian}, title = {Assignment Based Resource Constrained Path Generation for Railway Rolling Stock Optimization}, volume = {115}, booktitle = {23rd Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modelling, Optimization, and Systems (ATMOS 2023)}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ATMOS.2023.13}, pages = {13:1 -- 13:15}, year = {2023}, abstract = {The fundamental task of every passenger railway operator is to offer an attractive railway timetable to the passengers while operating it as cost efficiently as possible. The available rolling stock has to be assigned to trips so that all trips are operated, operational requirements are satisfied, and the operating costs are minimum. This so-called Rolling Stock Rotation Problem (RSRP) is well studied in the literature. In this paper we consider an acyclic version of the RSRP that includes vehicle maintenance. As the latter is an important aspect, maintenance services have to be planned simultaneously to ensure the rotation's feasibility in practice. Indeed, regular maintenance is important for the safety and reliability of the rolling stock as well as enforced by law in many countries. We present a new integer programming formulation that links a hyperflow to model vehicle compositions and their coupling decisions to a set of path variables that take care of the resource consumption of the individual vehicles. To solve the model we developed different column generation algorithms which are compared to each other as well as to the MILP flow formulation of [Ralf Bornd{\"o}rfer et al., 2016] on a test set of real world instances.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{BorndoerferCaselIssacetal.2021, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Casel, Katrin and Issac, Davis and Niklanovits, Aikaterini and Schwartz, Stephan and Zeif, Ziena}, title = {Connected k-partition of k-connected graphs and c-claw-free graphs}, volume = {207}, booktitle = {Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques, APPROX/RANDOM 2021}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX/RANDOM.2021.27}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-147200}, pages = {27:1 -- 27:14}, year = {2021}, abstract = {A connected partition is a partition of the vertices of a graph into sets that induce connected subgraphs. Such partitions naturally occur in many application areas such as road networks, and image processing. In these settings, it is often desirable to partition into a fixed number of parts of roughly of the same size or weight. The resulting computational problem is called Balanced Connected Partition (BCP). The two classical objectives for BCP are to maximize the weight of the smallest, or minimize the weight of the largest component. We study BCP on c-claw-free graphs, the class of graphs that do not have K_{1,c} as an induced subgraph, and present efficient (c -1)-approximation algorithms for both objectives. In particular, for 3-claw-free graphs, also simply known as claw-free graphs, we obtain a 2-approximation. Due to the claw-freeness of line graphs, this also implies a 2-approximation for the edge-partition version of BCP in general graphs. A harder connected partition problem arises from demanding a connected partition into k parts that have (possibly) heterogeneous target weights w_1, ..., w_k. In the 1970s Győri and Lov{\´a}sz showed that if G is k-connected and the target weights sum to the total size of G, such a partition exists. However, to this day no polynomial algorithm to compute such partitions exists for k > 4. Towards finding such a partition T_1, ..., T_k in k-connected graphs for general k, we show how to efficiently compute connected partitions that at least approximately meet the target weights, subject to the mild assumption that each w_i is greater than the weight of the heaviest vertex. In particular, we give a 3-approximation for both the lower and the upper bounded version i.e. we guarantee that each T_i has weight at least w_i/3 or that each T_i has weight most 3w_i, respectively. Also, we present a both-side bounded version that produces a connected partition where each T_i has size at least w_i/3 and at most max({r, 3})w_i, where r ≥1 is the ratio between the largest and smallest value in w_1, ..., w_k. In particular for the balanced version, i.e. w_1 = w_2 = ... = w_k, this gives a partition with 1/3 w_i ≤ w(T_i) ≤ 3w_i.}, language = {en} } @article{BorndoerferSchwartzSurau2023, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schwartz, Stephan and Surau, William}, title = {Vertex Covering with Capacitated Trees}, volume = {81}, journal = {Networks}, number = {2}, doi = {10.1002/net.22130}, pages = {253 -- 277}, year = {2023}, abstract = {The covering of a graph with (possibly disjoint) connected subgraphs is a funda-mental problem in graph theory. In this paper, we study a version to cover a graph'svertices by connected subgraphs subject to lower and upper weight bounds, and pro-pose a column generation approach to dynamically generate feasible and promisingsubgraphs. Our focus is on the solution of the pricing problem which turns out to bea variant of the NP-hard Maximum Weight Connected Subgraph Problem. We com-pare different formulations to handle connectivity, and find that a single-commodityflow formulation performs best. This is notable since the respective literature seemsto have widely dismissed this formulation. We improve it to a new coarse-to-fine flowformulation that is theoretically and computationally superior, especially for largeinstances with many vertices of degree 2 like highway networks, where it provides aspeed-up factor of 5 over the non-flow-based formulations. We also propose a pre-processing method that exploits a median property of weight-constrained subgraphs,a primal heuristic, and a local search heuristic. In an extensive computational studywe evaluate the presented connectivity formulations on different classes of instances,and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements. Their speed-upsessentially multiply to an overall factor of well over 10. Overall, our approach allowsthe reliable solution of instances with several hundreds of vertices in a few min-utes. These findings are further corroborated in a comparison to existing districtingmodels on a set of test instances from the literature}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{BorndoerferSchwartzSurau2022, author = {Bornd{\"o}rfer, Ralf and Schwartz, Stephan and Surau, William}, title = {Rooted Maximum Weight Connected Subgraphs with Balancing and Capacity Constraints}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Network Optimization Conference (INOC), Aachen, Germany, June 7-10, 2022}, doi = {10.48786/inoc.2022.12}, pages = {63 -- 68}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Finding connected subgraphs of maximum weight subject to additional constraints on the subgraphs is a common (sub)problem in many applications. In this paper, we study the Maximum Weight Connected Subgraph Problem with a given root node and a lower and upper capacity constraint on the chosen subgraph. In addition, the nodes of the input graph are colored blue and red, and the chosen subgraph is required to be balanced regarding its cumulated blue and red weight. This problem arises as an essential subproblem in district planning applications. We show that the problem is NP-hard and give an integer programming formulation. By exploiting the capacity and balancing condition, we develop a powerful reduction technique that is able to significantly shrink the problem size. In addition, we propose a method to strengthen the LP relaxation of our formulation by identifying conflict pairs, i.e., nodes that cannot be both part of a chosen subgraph. Our computational study confirms the positive impact of the new preprocessing technique and of the proposed conflict cuts.}, language = {en} } @misc{Schwartz2020, author = {Schwartz, Stephan}, title = {An Overview of Graph Covering and Partitioning}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-79431}, year = {2020}, abstract = {While graph covering is a fundamental and well-studied problem, this field lacks a broad and unified literature review. The holistic overview of graph covering given in this article attempts to close this gap. The focus lies on a characterization and classification of the different problems discussed in the literature. In addition, notable results and common approaches are also included. Whenever appropriate, our review extends to the corresponding partioning problems.}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{GamrathReutherSchlechteetal.2021, author = {Gamrath, Gerwin and Reuther, Markus and Schlechte, Thomas and Swarat, Elmar}, title = {An LP-based heuristic for Inspector Scheduling}, volume = {1}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling - PATAT 2021: Volume I}, pages = {77 -- 86}, year = {2021}, abstract = {We present a heuristic based on linear programming (LP) for the integrated tour and crew roster planning of toll enforcement inspectors. Their task is to enforce the proper paying of a distance-based toll on German motorways. This leads to an integrated tour planning and duty rostering problem; it is called Toll Enforcement Problem (TEP). We tackle the TEP by a standard multi-commodity flow model with some extensions in order to incorporate the control tours. The heuristic consists of two variants. The first, called Price \& Branch, is a column generation approach to solve the model's LP relaxation by pricing tour and roster arc variables. Then, we compute an integer feasible solution by restricting to all variables that were priced. The second is a coarse-to-fine approach. Its basic idea is projecting variables to an aggregated variable space, which is much smaller. The aim is to spend as much algorithmic effort in this coarse model as possible. For both heuristic procedures we will show that feasible solutions of high quality can be computed even for large scale industrial instances.}, language = {en} }