A branch-and-price guided search approach to maritime inventory routing

We apply the methodology Branch-and-Price Guided Search to a real-world maritime inventory routing problem. Computational experiments demonstrate that the approach quickly produces solutions that are near-optimal and of better quality than those produced by a state-of-the-art, commercial integer programming solver when given much more time. We also develop local search schemes to further reduce the time needed to find high quality solutions and present computational evidence of their efficacy. Research supported in part by funding from Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Company. ∗Corresponding author Email address: [email protected] (Mike Hewitt) Jin-Hwa Song is currently with SK Innovation, Seoul, Korea. Preprint submitted to Elsevier December 1, 2011