I. Computing Methodologies
Refine
Document Type
- ZIB-Report (2)
Language
- English (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (2)
Keywords
- Parallel Branch-and-Bound (1)
- QAP (1)
Institute
- Applied Algorithmic Intelligence Methods (2) (remove)
Consolidation of commodities and coordination of vehicle routes are fundamental features of supply chain management problems. While locations for consolidation and coordination are typically known a priori, in adaptive transportation networks this is not the case. The identification of such consolidation locations forms part of the decision making process. Supply chain management problems integrating the designation of consolidation locations with the coordination of long haul and local vehicle routing is not only challenging to solve, but also very difficult to formulate mathematically. In this paper, the first mathematical model integrating location clustering with long haul and local vehicle routing is proposed. This mathematical formulation is used to develop algorithms to find high quality solutions. A novel parallel framework is developed that combines exact and heuristic methods to improve the search for high quality solutions and provide valid bounds. The results demonstrate that using exact methods to guide heuristic search is an effective approach to find high quality solutions for difficult supply chain management problems.
We report our progress on the project for solving larger scale quadratic assignment problems (QAPs). Our main approach to solve large scale NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems such as QAPs is a parallel branch-and-bound method efficiently implemented on a powerful computer system using the Ubiquity Generator(UG) framework that can utilize more than 100,000 cores. Lower bounding procedures incorporated in the branch-and-bound method play a crucial role in solving the problems. For a strong lower bounding procedure, we employ the Lagrangian doubly nonnegative (DNN) relaxation and the Newton-bracketing method developed by the authors’ group. In this report, we describe some basic tools used in the project including the lower bounding procedure and branching rules, and present some preliminary numerical results.
Our next target problem is QAPs with dimension at least 50, as we have succeeded to solve tai30a and sko42 from QAPLIB for the first time.