A generalized shortest path tour problem with time windows

Abstract

This paper studies a generalization of the shortest path tour problem with time windows (GSPTPTW). The aim is to find a single-origin single-destination shortest path, which has to pass through an ordered sequence of not necessarily disjoint node-subsets. Each node has a time window for each node-subset to which it belongs. We investigate the theoretical properties of GSPTPTW and propose a dynamic programming approach to solve it. Numerical results collected on a large set of new benchmark instances highlight the effectiveness of the proposed solution approach.