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From the reviews:
„The routing of vehicles with limited capacities for carrying goods or people is one of the major problems in transport logistics. … The book is clearly structured and mostly well written. I can recommend it to any reader who wants to deepen his or her understanding of vehicle routing problems. … the book is not only suited for experts in the area of vehicle routing but also for interested practitioners (especially the application-oriented chapters); and students.“ (T Hanne, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 60 (11), 2009)
The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges
herausgegeben von Bruce L. Golden, S. Raghavan und Edward A. WasilTheoretical 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].