Introduction

Abstract

The booming e-commerce and growing reverse logistic flows further increase the need for appropriate vehicle routing optimization, in order to efficiently meet customer demand. Obviously, distribution companies want to minimize their distribution costs. Therefore, they typically have routing software available in order to minimize the total cost, distance, and/or time required to visit all their customers on a daily basis. This routing software is almost always based on the basic vehicle routing problem (VRP) (with different extensions). The objective of the VRP is to minimize the number of vehicles and/or the total distance required to visit a fixed set of customers, starting from a depot. Each customer has a certain demand and the available vehicles have a limited capacity. Another famous routing problem is the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). In the TSP, the objective is to find the shortest (single) route visiting all customers. This book shows the readers that many of these practical problems in logistics can be modeled more appropriately as a routing problem with profits instead of as a regular routing problem. Also tourist trip planning and, for instance, satellite scheduling and crowdsourcing problems are modeled adequately by routing problems with profits. As soon as all customers or points of interest or nodes have a certain profit and not all of them need to be visited, but a selection has to be made, routing problems with profits, in different variations, become relevant.