题  目：The Fascinating History of the Vehicle Routing Problem  

        （车辆路径优化问题研究）

演讲人：Gilbert Laporte，加拿大HEC Montréal商学院教授

主持人：镇璐，太阳成集团tyc33455cc教授

时  间：2016年8月26日（周五）下午2:00

地  点：太阳成集团tyc33455cc467室

主办单位：太阳成集团tyc33455cc、太阳成集团tyc33455cc青年教师联谊会

演讲内容简介：

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), introduced in 1959 by Dantzig and Ramser, plays a central role in distribution management.  It consists of designing a set least cost delivery or collection routes for a set of vehicles based at a depot and visiting a set of geographically scattered customers, subject to a variety of constraints. The most common constraints are capacity constraints, duration constraints and time windows. This talk will concentrate on the so-called classical VRP with capacity constraints only. The VRP is ubiquitous and highly important from an economic point of view. From a research perspective, it occupies a central role in operations research. Its study by the scientific community has fueled the development and growth of several families of exact and approximate algorithms. Exact algorithms such as branch-and-cut, column generation and branch-and-cut-and-price owe part of their evolution to the study of the VRP. Similarly, the most common classical heuristics and most of the more recent metaheuristics have been developed through the study of the VRP. In this talk I will highlight several of these developments. In spite of all the attention the VRP has received over the past 55 years, it can still only be solved exactly for relatively small instances (with slightly more than 100 customers) and the corresponding algorithms are rather intricate. Over the past 10 years or so, several powerful metaheuristics have been put forward for the approximate solutions of the VRP. The best ones combine concepts borrowed from local search and genetic search. Nowadays, the best metaheuristics can generate rather quickly solutions whose value lies within 1% of the best known solution values on a set of benchmark instances. This talk will also review these developments. It will close with some research outlooks.

演讲人简介：

Gilbert Laporte obtained his Ph.D. in Operations Research at the London School of Economics in 1975. He is professor of Operations Research at HEC Montréal, Canada Research Chair in Distribution Management. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 1998, and a Fellow of the INFORMS since 2005.He has been Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Science, Associate Editor of Operations Research, Naval Research Logistics, Computers & Operations Research and INFOR. He has authored or coauthored 19 books, as well as more than 500 scientific articles in combinatorial optimization, mostly in the areas of vehicle routing, location and timetabling.

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