The Vehicle Routing Problem

In the field of combinatorial optimization problems, the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is one of the most challenging. Defined more than 40 years ago, the problem involves designing the optimal set of routes for fleets of vehicles for the purpose of serving a given set of customers. Interest in VRP is motivated by its practical relevance as well as its considerable difficulty. The Vehicle Routing Problem covers both exact and heuristic methods developed for the VRP and some of its main variants, emphasizing the practical issues common to VRP. The book is composed of three parts containing contributions from well-known experts. The first part covers basic VRP, known more commonly as capacitated VRP. The second part covers three main variants of VRP: with time windows, backhauls, and pickup and delivery. The third part covers issues arising in real-world VRP applications and includes both case studies and references to software packages. This book will be of interest to both researchers and graduate level students in the communities of operations research and mathematical sciences. It focuses on a specific family of problems while offering a complete overview of the effective use of the most important techniques proposed for the solution of hard combinatorial problems. Practitioners will find this book particularly useful. Readers need a basic knowledge of the main methods for the solution of combinatorial optimization problems.