Vehicle Routing (2^nd Ed.) 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.

List of figures; List of tables; Preface to the second edition; Preface to the first edition; 1. The family of vehicle routing problems; Part I. The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem: 2. Classical exact algorithms for the capacitated vehicle routing problem; 3. New exact algorithms for the capacitated vehicle routing problem; 4. Heuristics for the vehicle routing problem; Part II. Important Variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem: 5. The vehicle routing problem with time windows; 6. Pickup-and-delivery problems for goods transportation; 7. Pickup-and-delivery problems for people transportation; 8. Stochastic vehicle routing problems; 9. Four variants of the vehicle routing problem; 10. Vehicle routing problems with profits; 11. Dynamic vehicle routing problems; Part III. Applications of the Vehicle Routing Problem: 12. Software tools and emerging technologies for vehicle routing and intermodal transportation; 13. Ship routing and scheduling in industrial and tramp shipping; 14. Vehicle routing applications in disaster relief; 15. Green vehicle routing; Index.

Paolo Toth is Professor Emeritus at Alma Mater Studiorum, University of Bologna, where he was a Full Professor of Combinatorial Optimization in the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering 'Guglielmo Marconi' from 1983 to 2013. He is the author of more than 170 papers and five books, and he serves on the editorial boards of several journals in the areas of operations research and transportation science. Among the several international awards he has received are the Harold Larnder Memorial Lecture (annual Award of CORS, the Canadian Operations Research Society, 1998), the EURO Gold Medal (the highest distinction within Operational Research in Europe, 1998), a doctorate honoris causa in operations research (University of Montreal, 2003), and the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science (Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS, 2005). He was named a VeRoLog Fellow in 2012. His research interests include operational research and mathematical programming methodologies.