The Vehicle Routing Problem

The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges

Theoretical research and practical applications in the ?eld of vehicle routing started in 1959 with the truck dispatching problem posed by Dantzig and Ramser [1]: ?nd the “. . . optimum routing of a ?eet of gasoline delivery trucks between a bulk terminal and a large number of service stations supplied by the terminal. ” Using a method based on a linear programming formulation, their hand calculations produced a near-optimal solution with four routes to aproblemwithtwelve service stations. The authorsproclaimed:“Nopractical applications of the method have been made as yet. ” In the nearly 50 years since the Dantzig and Ramser paper appeared, work in the ?eld has exploded dramatically. Today, a Google Scholar search of the words vehicle routing problem (VRP) yields more than 21,700 entries. The June 2006 issue of OR/MS Today provided a survey of 17 vendors of commercial routing software whose packages are currently capable of solving average-size problems with 1,000 stops, 50 routes, and two-hour hard-time windows in two to ten minutes [2]. In practice, vehicle routing may be the single biggest success story in operations research. For example, each day 103,500 drivers at UPS follow computer-generated routes. The drivers visit 7. 9 million customers and handle an average of 15. 6 million packages [3].

The Vehicle Routing Problem

The Evolution of the Vehicle Routing Problem

This book presents state-of-the-art research and practice in optimization routing, specifically the vehicle routing problem (VRP). Since its introduction in the late 1950s, the VRP has been a very significant area of research and practice in operations research. Vehicles are used to make deliveries and for pick-ups every day and everywhere. Companies such as Amazon, UPS, FedEx, and DHL use route optimization to reduce mileage, fuel use, number of trucks on the road, and carbon dioxide emissions. The authors compile and analyze 135 survey and review articles on vehicle routing topics published between 2005 and 2022 in an effort to make key observations about publication and trend history, summarize the overall contributions in the field, and identify trends in VRP research and practice. The authors have compiled published research on models, algorithms, and applications for specific areas, including: alternative and multiple objectives; arc routing and general routing; drones, last-mile delivery, and urban distribution; dynamic and stochastic routing; green routing; inventory routing; loading constraints; location-routing; multiple depots; pickup and delivery and dial-a-ride problems; rich and multi-attribute routing; routing over time; shipping; two-echelon, collaborative, and inter-terminal problems; specific variants, benchmark datasets, and software; and exact algorithms and heuristics. In addition, the book discusses how vehicle routing problems are among the most widely studied problems in combinatorial optimization due to the mathematical complexity and practical significance.