Linear Formulations for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Synchronization Constraints

Abstract : This paper studies a vehicle routing problem with synchronization constraints and time windows. In this problem, a subset of nodes requires more than one vehicle to satisfy its demand simultaneously. We propose three new mixed integer linear formulations for this problem and we evaluate their efficiency over a large set of instances taken from the literature. The computational results reveal that the proposed linear formulations allow solving larger instances in a shorter computational time than the ones previously proposed in the literature.