Solving the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem with time windows by branch-and-cut

Many optimization problems have several equivalent mathematical models. It is often not apparent which of these models is most suitable for practical computation, in particular, when a certain application with a specific range of instance sizes is in focus. Our paper addresses the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman Problem with time windows (ATSP-TW) from such a point of view. The real–world application we aim at is the control of a stacker crane in a warehouse.?We have implemented codes based on three alternative integer programming formulations of the ATSP-TW and more than ten heuristics. Computational results for real-world instances with up to 233 nodes are reported, showing that a new model presented in a companion paper outperforms the other two models we considered – at least for our special application – and that the heuristics provide acceptable solutions. Received: August 1999 / Accepted: September 2000?Published online April 12, 2001