A survey of recent research on location-routing problems

The design of distribution systems raises hard combinatorial optimization problems. For instance, facility location problems must be solved at the strategic decision level to place factories and warehouses, while vehicle routes must be built at the tactical or operational levels to supply customers. In fact, location and routing decisions are interdependent and studies have shown that the overall system cost may be excessive if they are tackled separately. The location-routing problem (LRP) integrates the two kinds of decisions. Given a set of potential depots with opening costs, a fleet of identical vehicles and a set of customers with known demands, the classical LRP consists in opening a subset of depots, assigning customers to them and determining vehicle routes, to minimize a total cost including the cost of open depots, the fixed costs of vehicles used, and the total cost of the routes. Since the last comprehensive survey on the LRP, published by Nagy and Salhi (2007), the number of articles devoted to this problem has grown quickly, calling a review of new research works. This paper analyzes the recent literature (72 articles) on the standard LRP and new extensions such as several distribution echelons, multiple objectives or uncertain data. Results of state-of-the-art metaheuristics are also compared on standard sets of instances for the classical LRP, the two-echelon LRP and the truck and trailer problem.     

Heuristics for multi-attribute vehicle routing problems: A survey and synthesis

The attributes of vehicle routing problems are additional characteristics or constraints that aim to better take into account the specificities of real applications. The variants thus formed are supported by a well-developed literature, including a large variety of heuristics. This article first reviews the main classes of attributes, providing a survey of heuristics and meta-heuristics for Multi-Attribute Vehicle Routing Problems (MAVRP). It then takes a closer look at the concepts of 64 remarkable meta-heuristics, selected objectively for their outstanding performance on 15 classic MAVRP with different attributes. This cross-analysis leads to the identification of “winning strategies” in designing effective heuristics for MAVRP. This is an important step in the development of general and efficient solution methods for dealing with the large range of vehicle routing variants.     

Molekulargewicht

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Platinum-nanogaps for single-molecule electronics: room-temperature stability

We present the formation of single-molecule devices based on nanometre-spaced platinum electrodes. The electrodes are fabricated using a self-breaking electromigration method which yields nanogaps with long-term stability at room temperature [Prins et al., APL, 2009, 94, 123108.]. The stability at room temperature allows for detailed comparison of the device electrical properties before and after deposition of the molecules. In this way, conductance as a result of direct tunneling between the electrodes can be distinguished from conductance through the molecule. After molecule deposition, some devices display transport in the strong coupling regime while others are in the weak-coupling Coulomb blockade regime. Gated transport is observed in the latter case.     

Improving robustness of solutions to arc routing problems

This paper considers the stochastic capacitated arc routing problem (SCARP), obtained by taking random demands in the CARP. For real-world problems, it is important to create solutions that are insensitive to changes in demand, because these quantities are not deterministic but randomly distributed. This paper provides the basic concept of a new technique to compute such solutions, based upon the best method published for CARP: a hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA). The simulation analysis was achieved with the well-known DeArmon's, Eglese's and Belenguer's instances. This intensive evaluation process was carried out with 1000 replications providing high-quality statistical data. The results obtained prove that there is a great interest to optimize not only the solution cost but also the robustness of solutions. This work is a step forward to treat more realistic problems including industrial goals and constraints linked to demand variations.     

Efficient Heuristics for the Heterogeneous Fleet Multitrip VRP with Application to a Large-Scale Real Case

The basic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) consists of computing a set of trips of minimum total cost, to deliver fixed amounts of goods to customers with a fleet of identical vehicles. Few papers address the case with several types of vehicles (heterogeneous fleet). Most of them assume an unlimited number of vehicles of each type, to dimension the fleet from a strategic point of view. This paper tackles the more realistic tactical or operational case, with a fixed number of vehicles of each type, and the optional possibility for each vehicle to perform several trips. It describes several heuristics, including a very efficient one that progressively merges small starting trips, while ensuring that they can be performed by the fleet. This heuristic seeks to minimize the number of required vehicles as a secondary objective. It outperforms classical VRP heuristics, can easily handle various constraints, and gives very good initial solutions for a tabu search method. The real case of a French manufacturer of furniture with 775 destination stores is presented.     

A 13C n.m.r. study of the charge-transfer complexes between o-chloranil and some aromatic electron donors

The ¹³C n.m.r. spectra of complexes between o-chloranil and aromatic electron donors were studied. Complexation leads to a general diamagnetic shift of the ¹³C n.m.r. signals for the acceptor (o-chloranil), but for signals from the ¹³C nuclei in the donors both diamagnetic and paramagnetic shifts are found. These phenomena are thought to be the result of competing anisotropy and charge-migration effects. Charge migration in o-chloranil complexes appears to be more important than in corresponding 1,3,5-trinitrobenzene complexes.