New integer programming formulation for multiple traveling repairmen problem

Abstract

The multiple traveling repairman problem (kTRP) is a generalization of the traveling repairman problem which is also known as the minimum latency problem and the deliveryman problem. In these problems, waiting time or latency of a customer is defined as the time passed from the beginning of the travel until this customer's service completed. The objective is to find a Hamiltonian Tour or a Hamiltonian Path that minimizes the total waiting time of customers so that each customer is visited by one of the repairmen. In this paper, we propose a new mixed integer linear programming formulation for the multiple traveling repairman problem where each repairman starts from the depot and finishes the journey at a given node. In order to see the performance of the proposed formulation against existing formulations, we conduct computational analysis by solving benchmark instances appeared in the literature. Computational results show that proposed model is extremely effective than the others in terms of CPU times. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier