Solving a fuel delivery problem by heuristic and exact approaches

In this paper we study the case of a company that delivers different types of fuel to a set of fuel pumps. The company has one warehouse and supplies the pumps by a fleet of trucks with several tanks of differing capacities. The company's aim is to satisfy the orders using the available resources (trucks and drivers) with the minimum total travel cost for delivery. The problem has been formulated as a Set Partitioning model, solved by a Branch-and-Price algorithm. A fast combinatorial heuristic was adopted both to find a good feasible solution very quickly and to provide an initial set of columns for the Branch-and-Price algorithm. Computational results are reported. The exact approach shows low computation time for the real instances provided by the company. (C) 2002 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.