A Novel Column Generation Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking

In this paper we present a novel column generation (CG) formulation and a branch-and-price (BP) algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Cross-Docking (VRPCD). Our BP algorithm is compared with a previous algorithm to solve the VRPCD and the computational results show that our approach dominates the other in terms of the quality of lower and upper bounds and also can evaluate optimal solutions faster.