The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges

Bruce L. Golden (Curatore)

S. Raghavan (Curatore)

Springer-Verlag New York Inc., 2010

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].

• Curatore: Bruce L. Golden, S. Raghavan
• Editore: Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
• Collana: Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series
• Anno: 2010
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 591 p.
• Dimensioni: 235 x 155 mm
• EAN: 9781441946034

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