A COLUMN-GENERATION-BASED APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM OF ROUTING VEHICLES WITH INTERMEDIATE FACILITIES

A variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the Vehicle Routing Problem with intermediate facilities is widely applied in contexts such as waste collection and urban logistics. This work aims to bring a formulation to the problem in which vehicles can make multiple trips and unload their cargo at intermediate points along the routes, enabling a continuous service without the need for immediate return to the main warehouse. To solve the problem, a model based on column generation using VRPSolver is proposed, in which viable routes are represented as paths with resource constraints in a graph. In addition, computational experiments are carried out in instances adapted from the literature to evaluate the quality of the solutions and the computational performance of the proposed approach. The results demonstrate that the approach brought the optimal solution of instances of up to 76 vertices, considering a feasible time.