Vehicle Routing

The vehicle routing problem lies at the heart of distribution management. It is faced each day by thousands of companies and organizations engaged in the delivery and collection of goods or people. Because conditions vary from one setting to the next, the objectives and constraints encountered in practice are highly variable. Most algorithmic research and software development in this area focus on a limited number of prototype problems. By building enough flexibility in optimization systems one can adapt these to various practical contexts. Much progress has been made since the publication of the first article on the “truck dispatching” problem by Dantzig and Ramser (1959). Several variants of the basic problem have been put forward. Strong formulations have been proposed, together with polyhedral studies and exact decomposition algorithms. Numerous heuristics have also been developed for vehicle routing problems. In particular the study of this class of problems has stimulated the emergence and the growth of several metaheuristics whose performance is constantly improving. This chapter focuses on some of the most important vehicle routing problem types. A number of other variants have been treated in recent articles and