Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications

Vehicle routing problems, among the most studied in combinatorial optimization, arise in many practical contexts (freight distribution and collection, transportation, refuse collection, and so on). Researchers have made significant recent progress in the development of solution algorithms, which are explored in this book. The text of this new edition is either completely new or significantly revised and provides extensive state-of-the-art coverage of vehicle routing; it emphasizes methodologies for specific classes of vehicle routing problems and contains a complete overview of current solutions to combinatorial optimization problems. It also includes several chapters on important and emerging applications, such as disaster relief and green vehicle routing. This book is intended for both researchers and graduate students in operations research and applied mathematics. Practitioners will find this book particularly useful. Readers need only basic knowledge of the main solution methods for combinatorial optimization problems.