Industrial Vehicle Routing

Geir Hasle () and Oddvar Kloster ()
Additional contact information
Geir Hasle: Applied Mathematics, SINTEF ICT
Oddvar Kloster: Applied Mathematics, SINTEF ICT

A chapter in Geometric Modelling, Numerical Simulation, and Optimization, 2007, pp 397-435 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a key to efficiency in transportation and supply chain management. The VRP is an NP-hard problem that comes in many guises. The VRP literature contains thousands of papers, and VRP research is regarded as one of the great successes of OR. Vehicle routing decision support tools provide substantial savings in society every day, and an industry of routing tool vendors has emerged. Exact methods of today cannot consistently solve VRP instances with more than 50–100 customers in reasonable time, which is generally a small number in real-life applications. For industrial problem sizes, and if one aims at solving a variety of VRP variants, approximation methods is the only viable approach. There is still a need for VRP research, particularly for large-scale instances and complex, rich VRP variants. In this chapter, we give a brief general introduction to the VRP. We then describe how industrial requirements motivate extensions to the basic, rather idealized VRP models that have received most attention in the research community, and how such extensions can be made. At SINTEF Applied Mathematics, industrial variants of the VRP have been studied since 1995. Our efforts have led to the development of a generic VRP solver that has been commercialized through a spin-off company. We give a description of the underlying, rich VRP model and the selected uniform algorithmic approach, which is based on metaheuristics. Finally, results from computational experiments are presented. In conclusion, we point to important issues in further VRP research.

Keywords: Transportation; Logistics; Optimization; VRP; Modeling; Approximation; Metaheuristics; Routing Tool (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-68783-2_12

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540687832

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-68783-2_12

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().