A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE CAPABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE MIXED INTEGER PROGRAMMING FORMULATIONS

Abstract

In selecting the best mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation the important issue is to figure out how to evaluate the performance of each candidate formulation in terms of selected criteria. The main objective of this study is to propose a systematic approach to guide the selection of the best MILP formulation among the alternatives according to the needs of the decision maker. For this reason we consider the problem of "selecting the most appropriate MILP formulation for a certain type of decision maker" as a multi-criteria decision making problem and present an integrated AHP-TOPSIS decision making methodology to select the most appropriate formulation. As an example the proposed decision making methodology is implemented on the selection of the MILP formulations of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). A numerical example is provided for illustrative purposes. As a result, the proposed decision model can be a tool for the decision makers (here they are the scientists, engineers and practitioners) who intend to choose the appropriate mathematical model(s) among the alternatives according to their needs on their studies. The integrated AHP-TOPSIS approach can simply be incorporated into a computer-based decision support system since it has simplicity in both computation and application.