A Simultaneous Magnanti-Wong Method to Accelerate Benders Decomposition for the Metropolitan Container Transportation Problem

When shipping ports are colocated with major population centers, the exclusive use of road transport for moving shipping containers across the metropolitan area is undesirable from both social and economic perspectives. Port shuttles, an integrated road and short-haul rail transport modality, are thereby gaining significant interest from governments and industry alike, especially in the Australian context. In “A Simultaneous Magnanti-Wong Method to Accelerate Benders Decomposition for the Metropolitan Container Transportation Problem,” Perrykkad, Ernst, and Krishnamoorthy explore the mathematics behind the optimal integration of road and port shuttle modalities for container transportation in metropolitan areas, including proofs of NP harness, a Benders decomposition, and an extensive computational study. Critically, to accelerate their Benders decomposition the authors develop the simultaneous Magnanti-Wong method: an extension of the classical Magnanti-Wong acceleration that preserves this problem's important network substructure. In addition to the problem at hand, this technique shows promise more generally for Benders decompositions with special subproblem structure.