An open, reproducible branch-and-cut for the capacitated profitable tour problem: a component study

Abstract

We present an open, reproducible branch-and-cut (B&C) algorithm for the capacitated profitable tour problem (CPTP) and its open s-t path variant, the capacity-constrained elementary shortest-path problem. The solver re-implements the formulation and cut families of Jepsen et al. (2014) on a fully open mixed-integer programming stack (HiGHS; Huangfu and Hall, 2018), and adds bound-based preprocessing, domain propagation, and reduced-cost variable fixing. We claim no new method; the contribution is twofold. First, an open, reproducible artifact: to our knowledge the first branch-and-cut for this problem class on a fully open stack, with the formulation, every separator, and all benchmark scripts released, so the results below can be rerun and the solver reused and extended as a baseline. Second, a component study on this common modern stack, benchmarked against a dynamic-programming/labelling reference, that decomposes which components pay off and where the running time goes. We find that the capacity-class cuts account for essentially the entire benefit (adding them to a connectivity-only baseline lifts the number of instances solved from 52 to 64 of 76 and shrinks the search tree more than tenfold), while comb and rounded generalized-large-multistar cuts, reduced-cost fixing, and bound-based propagation add nothing measurable. We also report a negative result: the shortest-path-incompatibility (SPI) cut, a variant of the node-precedence inequalities of Garc\'ia (2009), finds no violated inequality on any instance. The solver and all experiments are released as open, reproducible software (Spoorendonk, 2026).