Guest Editorial: Recent Trends in Routing

Following the success of the first VeRoLog conference at the Universitá di Bologna in 2012, the second VeRoLog conference was held from July 7 to July 10, 2013 at the University of Southampton, UK. The organizing committee consisted of Prof Chris Potts, Prof Julia Bennell, Dr Maria Battarra, and Dr Güneş Erdoğan. The conference was of interest to academics and practitioners alike, with a total of 105 presentations received and 113 participants hosted. Further details of the conference are available at https://www.ocs.soton.ac.uk/index.php/verolog/verolog2013. This special issue of Networks consists of studies presented at VeRoLog 2013. The presentations explored diverse aspects of vehicle routing problems, ranging from the time component to the route length balance, with various applications ranging from waste collection to supplier selection. Through a meticulous refereeing process, we believe that we were able to select a subset of high quality papers that reflect the state-of-art of the research on vehicle routing. “Timing problems and algorithms: Time decisions for sequences of activities”, co-authored by Vidal, Crainic, Gendreau, and Prins, focuses on the timing problems arising in a large of number of fields, including production, project scheduling, statistical inference, network optimization, and vehicle routing. They present a classification scheme together with a categorization of complexity. They also underline the importance of re-optimization algorithms for timing problems and introduce a framework of formalism for describing them. Avella, Boccia, and Wolsey study the Vendor Managed Inventory Routing Problem in their paper entitled “Single-item reformulations for a Vendor Managed Inventory Routing Problem: computational experience with