The Vehicle Routing Problem

1986-12The routing of a fleet of vehicles is an area of both theoretical and practical importance. From a practical point of view, government and industry could save many million dollars by routing vehicles efficiently. Its practical applications encompass a wide variety of activities such as school bus routing, railway fleet routing, delivery of mail, and dispatching of delivery truck for customer goods. There are numerous variations due to the various underlying assumptions associated with the problem. Despite these varieties, the essential components of the problem are a fleet of vehicles and a set of customers with known demands. To formalize the routing problem we provide notation and give below a formulation of the vehicle routing problem