The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges

Theoretical research and practical applications in the field of vehicle routing started in 1959 with the truck dispatching problem posed by Dantzig and Ramser [1]: find 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....