In many European countries, municipalities offer their inhabitants a wide variety of social services. In this paper we will focus on efficiently scheduling home care, transportation of the elderly, and home meal delivery. These so-called municipal or communal routing problems can be modelled as different variants of the vehicle routing problem, a well-known optimization problem from the literat...

We consider the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (VRPSD). We give randomized approximation algorithms achieving approximation guarantees of 1 + for split-delivery VRPSD, and 2 + for unsplit-delivery VRPSD; here  is the best approximation guarantee for the traveling salesman problem. These bounds match the best known for even the respective deterministic problems [Altinkemer, K...

We study a variant of dynamic vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries where a vehicle is allocated to each service (i.e., trip) request immediately upon the arrival of the request. Solutions to this problem can be characterized as dynamic policies that define how each customer is handled by operating a fleet of vehicles. Evaluation of such policies is beyond the grasp of analytical ...

The integrated operational transportation planning problem extends the traditional vehicle routing and scheduling problem by the possibility of outsourcing a part of the requests by involving subcontractors. The purpose of this paper is to present the integrated planning problem and to propose an approach for solving it by a tabu search heuristic. Existing approaches from literature which discu...

This paper presents a new sweep based heuristic for the fleet size and mix vehicle routing problem. This problem involves two kinds of decisions: the selection of a mix of vehicles among the available vehicle types and the routing of the selected fleet. The proposed algorithm first generates a large number of routes that are serviced by one or two vehicles. The selection of routes and vehicles ...

In contrast to the classical location-allocation models, the location-routing problem (LRP) integrates vehicle routing and scheduling aspects in the location planning process. A survey and classification scheme of location-routing is e.g. proposed by [3] and [2]. This paper presents a LRP of a company which distributes finished cars. This LRP is decomposed into two steps. In the first step a se...

Freight transportation constitutes one of the main activities that influences economy and society, as it assures a vital link between suppliers and customers and is represents a major source of employment. Multi-echelon distribution is one of the most common strategies adopted by the transportation companies in an aim of cots reduction. Although vehicle routing problems are very common in opera...

The purpose of this paper is to describe industrial aspects of combined fleet composition and routing in maritime and road-based transportation, and to present the current status of research in the form of a comprehensive literature review. With a backdrop of industrial aspects, a categorized survey of relevant literature since the first published papers in the 1950’s is given. First, the liter...