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Routing a Heterogeneous Fleet of Vehicles

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The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges

Part of the book series: Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces ((ORCS,volume 43))

Summary

In the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) a set of identical vehicles, based at a central depot, is to be optimally routed to supply customers with known demands subject to vehicle capacity constraints.

An important variant of the VRP arises when a fleet of vehicles characterized by different capacities and costs is available for distribution activities. The problem is known as the Mixed Fleet VRP or as the Heterogeneous Fleet VRP.

This chapter gives an overview of approaches from the literature to solve heterogeneous VRPs. In particular, we classify the different variants described in the literature and, as no exact algorithm has been presented for any variants of heterogeneous VRP, we review the lower bounds and the heuristic algorithms proposed. Computational results, comparing the performance of the different heuristic algorithms on benchmark instances, are also discussed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEIS, University of Bologna, via Venezia 52, 47023 Cesena, Italy

    Roberto Baldacci, Maria Battarra & Daniele Vigo

Authors
  1. Roberto Baldacci
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  2. Maria Battarra
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  3. Daniele Vigo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roberto Baldacci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Bruce Golden  & S. Raghavan  & 

  2. American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Edward Wasil

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Baldacci, R., Battarra, M., Vigo, D. (2008). Routing a Heterogeneous Fleet of Vehicles. In: Golden, B., Raghavan, S., Wasil, E. (eds) The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces, vol 43. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77778-8_1

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