Road-based goods transportation: a survey of real-world logistics applications from 2000 to 2015
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paper_title: A period vehicle routing case study

paper_content:

Abstract The period vehicle routing problem is a multilevel problem assembling two classical problems: the assignment problem and the vehicle routing problem. Collection days have to be assigned to each customer and vehicle routes have to be designed for each day of the period (time horizon) so that the total distribution cost is minimised. The interaction between the temporal and spatial aspects turns the problem into one of the most challenging variations of vehicle routing. In this paper, we present the study of a real period vehicle routing system: the collection of recycling paper containers in the City Council of Almada, Portugal.
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paper_title: Rich routing problems arising in supply chain management

paper_content:

The purpose of this paper is to provide basic models for highly relevant extensions of the classical vehicle routing problem in the context of supply chain management. The classical vehicle routing problem is extended in various ways. We will especially focus on extensions with respect to lotsizing, scheduling, packing, batching, inventory and intermodality. The proposed models allow for a more efficient use of resources, while explicitly taking into account interdependencies among the subproblems. The contribution of this survey is twofold: (i) it provides an overview of recent and suitable literature for the interested scholar and (ii) it presents six integrative models for the above mentioned extensions.
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paper_title: Thirty Years of Inventory Routing

paper_content:

The inventory-routing problem (IRP) dates back 30 years. It can be described as the combination of vehicle-routing and inventory management problems, in which a supplier has to deliver products to a number of geographically dispersed customers, subject to side constraints. It provides integrated logistics solutions by simultaneously optimizing inventory management, vehicle routing, and delivery scheduling. Some exact algorithms and several powerful metaheuristic and matheuristic approaches have been developed for this class of problems, especially in recent years. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive review of this literature, based on a new classification of the problem. We categorize IRPs with respect to their structural variants and the availability of information on customer demand.
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paper_title: Ship Routing and Scheduling: Status and Perspectives

paper_content:

The objective of this paper is to review the current status of ship routing and scheduling. We focus on literature published during the last decade. Because routing and scheduling problems are closely related to many other fleet planning problems, we have divided this review into several parts. We start at the strategic fleet planning level and discuss the design of fleets and sea transport systems. We continue with the tactical and operational fleet planning level and consider problems that comprise various ship routing and scheduling aspects. Here, we separately discuss the different modes of operations: industrial, tramp, and liner shipping. Finally, we take a glimpse at naval applications and other related problems that do not naturally fall into these categories. The paper also presents some perspectives regarding future developments and use of optimization-based decision-support systems for ship routing and scheduling. Several of the trends indicate both accelerating needs for and benefits from such systems and, hopefully, this paper will stimulate further research in this area.
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paper_title: Ship routing and scheduling in the new millennium

paper_content:

We review research on ship routing and scheduling and related problems during the new millennium and provide four basic models in this domain. The volume of research in this area about doubles every decade as does the number of research outlets. We have found over a hundred new refereed papers on this topic during the last decade. Problems of wider scope have been addressed as well as more specialized ones. However, complex critical problems remain wide open and provide challenging opportunities for future research.
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paper_title: The petrol station replenishment problem with time windows

paper_content:

In the Petrol Station Replenishment Problem with Time Windows (PSRPTW) the aim is to optimize the delivery of several petroleum products to a set of petrol stations using a limited heterogeneous fleet of tank-trucks. More specifically, one must determine the quantity of each product to deliver, the assignment of products to truck compartments, delivery routes, and schedules. The objective is to maximize the total profit equal to the sales revenue, minus the sum of routing costs and of regular and overtime costs. This article first proposes a mathematical formulation of the PSRPTW. It then describes two heuristics based on arc preselection and on route preselection. Extensive computational tests on randomly generated instances confirm the efficiency of the proposed heuristics. Finally, a performance analysis on a real case shows a distance reduction of more than 20% over a solution obtained by an experienced dispatcher.
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paper_title: Integrating purchasing and routing in a propane gas supply chain

paper_content:

Abstract This paper addresses the integration of purchasing and routing for a propane gas supply chain. The focus is on the wholesale side of the supply network. Rigorous solution methods using both set partitioning and tabu search are developed for obtaining optimal and near-optimal solutions for the purchasing/routing problem. The proposed methods are applied to a real-world propane distribution problem. The results of the study indicate that the potential annual cost savings through the integration of purchasing and routing decisions can range up to millions of dollars for large distributors. The methods can also be used strategically as an aid in reconfiguring the supply network involving depot locations, tanker fleet sizing, and allocation of capacity at supply terminals. The methodology could also be used to provide decision support for distributing other energy products such as heating oil.
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paper_title: Integration of the Load-Matching and Routing Problem with Equipment Balancing for Small Package Carriers

paper_content:

Small package delivery is a multibillion dollar industry with complex planning decisions required to efficiently utilize costly resources and meet tight time requirements. The planning process is typically decomposed into sequential subproblems to establish tractability. This decomposition can greatly degrade solution quality. This paper therefore considers the integration of two closely related key subproblems: load matching and routing and equipment balancing. First, we identify critical challenges faced in trying to solve these problems. Then we present a novel modeling approach to address these challenges. Finally, we conclude with computational results from United Parcel Service, the world's largest package delivery company, demonstrating an improvement of approximately 5% over the company's existing methods for solving this pair of problems.
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paper_title: Improving routing and scheduling decisions at a distributor of industrial gasses

paper_content:

This paper investigates cyclical inventory replenishment for a company's regional distribution center that supplies, distributes, and manages inventory of carbon dioxide (CO2) at over 900 separate customer sites in Indiana. The company previously experienced high labor costs with excessive overtime and maintained a regular back-log of customers experiencing stockouts. To address these issues we implemented a three-phase heuristic for the cyclical inventory routing problem encountered at one of the company's distribution centers. This heuristic determines regular routes for each of three available delivery vehicles over a 12-day delivery horizon while improving four primary performance measures: delivery labor cost, stockouts, delivery regularity, and driver-customer familiarity. It does so by first determining three sets of cities (one for each delivery vehicle) that must be delivered to each day based on customer requirements. Second, the heuristic assigns the remaining customers in other cities to one of the three "backbone routes" determined in phase 1. And third, it balances customer deliveries on each daily route over the schedule horizon. Through our methodology, we were able to significantly reduce overtime, driving time, and labor costs while improving customer service.
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paper_title: Solving a fuel delivery problem by heuristic and exact approaches

paper_content:

Abstract In this paper we study the case of a company that delivers different types of fuel to a set of fuel pumps. The company has one warehouse and supplies the pumps by a fleet of trucks with several tanks of differing capacities. The company’s aim is to satisfy the orders using the available resources (trucks and drivers) with the minimum total travel cost for delivery. The problem has been formulated as a Set Partitioning model, solved by a Branch-and-Price algorithm. A fast combinatorial heuristic was adopted both to find a good feasible solution very quickly and to provide an initial set of columns for the Branch-and-Price algorithm. Computational results are reported. The exact approach shows low computation time for the real instances provided by the company.
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paper_title: Petrol delivery tanker assignment and routing: a case study in Hong Kong

paper_content:

In this paper, we present a case study on a tanker assignment and routing problem for petrol products in Hong Kong. A fleet of heterogeneous dangerous goods vehicles has been assigned to deliver several types of petroleum products to petrol stations with different tank capacities. Under the vendor-managed inventory system, the delivery company is responsible for controlling the station's inventory and replenishment. The operational characteristics and challenges such as geographic zoning, size of petrol stations, routing restrictions and so on are unique and have been described in this paper. A decision support system (DSS) combining heuristic clustering and optimal routing is employed to find the optimal fleet assignment and routing. Multiple objectives are considered simultaneously such that the number of tankers used could be minimized, the number of drops in trips is minimized, profit in terms of total products delivered is maximized and utilization of resources is maximized. The case illustrates the benefit and advantages of using the proposed DSS.
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paper_title: Efficient Heuristics for the Heterogeneous Fleet Multitrip VRP with Application to a Large-Scale Real Case

paper_content:

The basic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) consists of computing a set of trips of minimum total cost, to deliver fixed amounts of goods to customers with a fleet of identical vehicles. Few papers address the case with several types of vehicles (heterogeneous fleet). Most of them assume an unlimited number of vehicles of each type, to dimension the fleet from a strategic point of view. This paper tackles the more realistic tactical or operational case, with a fixed number of vehicles of each type, and the optional possibility for each vehicle to perform several trips. It describes several heuristics, including a very efficient one that progressively merges small starting trips, while ensuring that they can be performed by the fleet. This heuristic seeks to minimize the number of required vehicles as a secondary objective. It outperforms classical VRP heuristics, can easily handle various constraints, and gives very good initial solutions for a tabu search method. The real case of a French manufacturer of furniture with 775 destination stores is presented.
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paper_title: A period vehicle routing case study

paper_content:

Abstract The period vehicle routing problem is a multilevel problem assembling two classical problems: the assignment problem and the vehicle routing problem. Collection days have to be assigned to each customer and vehicle routes have to be designed for each day of the period (time horizon) so that the total distribution cost is minimised. The interaction between the temporal and spatial aspects turns the problem into one of the most challenging variations of vehicle routing. In this paper, we present the study of a real period vehicle routing system: the collection of recycling paper containers in the City Council of Almada, Portugal.
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paper_title: Improved route planning and scheduling of waste collection and transport

paper_content:

The collection of waste is a highly visible and important municipal service that involves large expenditures. Waste collection problems are, however, one of the most difficult operational problems to solve. This paper describes the optimization of vehicle routes and schedules for collecting municipal solid waste in Eastern Finland. The solutions are generated by a recently developed guided variable neighborhood thresholding metaheuristic that is adapted to solve real-life waste collection problems. Several implementation approaches to speed up the method and cut down the memory usage are discussed. A case study on the waste collection in two regions of Eastern Finland demonstrates that significant cost reductions can be obtained compared with the current practice.
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paper_title: Ship routing and scheduling in the new millennium

paper_content:

We review research on ship routing and scheduling and related problems during the new millennium and provide four basic models in this domain. The volume of research in this area about doubles every decade as does the number of research outlets. We have found over a hundred new refereed papers on this topic during the last decade. Problems of wider scope have been addressed as well as more specialized ones. However, complex critical problems remain wide open and provide challenging opportunities for future research.
---
paper_title: Integration of the Load-Matching and Routing Problem with Equipment Balancing for Small Package Carriers

paper_content:

Small package delivery is a multibillion dollar industry with complex planning decisions required to efficiently utilize costly resources and meet tight time requirements. The planning process is typically decomposed into sequential subproblems to establish tractability. This decomposition can greatly degrade solution quality. This paper therefore considers the integration of two closely related key subproblems: load matching and routing and equipment balancing. First, we identify critical challenges faced in trying to solve these problems. Then we present a novel modeling approach to address these challenges. Finally, we conclude with computational results from United Parcel Service, the world's largest package delivery company, demonstrating an improvement of approximately 5% over the company's existing methods for solving this pair of problems.
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paper_title: Recyclable waste collection planning--a case study

paper_content:

Abstract This paper describes a study of planning vehicle routes for the collection of urban recyclable waste. The aim is to create collection routes for every day of the month, to be repeated every month, minimizing the operation cost. Two important features of the problem are the planning of a relatively long period of time and the separate collection of three types of waste. The collection operation was modelled in accordance to the practice of the company that manages the collection system. Heuristic techniques were developed to solve the model in three phases: definition of the geographic zones served by the vehicles, definition of the waste type to collect on each day of the month, definition of the collection routes. Preliminary results suggest that significant economies in collection costs are possible.
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paper_title: A stochastic dynamic traveling salesman problem with hard time windows

paper_content:

Just-in-time (JIT) trucking service, i.e., arriving at customers within specified time windows, has become the norm for freight carriers in all stages of supply chains. In this paper, a JIT pickup/delivery problem is formulated as a stochastic dynamic traveling salesman problem with time windows (SDTSPTW). At a customer location, the vehicle either picks up goods for or delivers goods from the depot, but does not provide moving service to transfer goods from one location to another. Such routing problems are NP-hard in deterministic settings, and in our context, complicated further by the stochastic, dynamic nature of the problem. This paper develops an efficient heuristic for the SDTSPTW with hard time windows. The heuristic is shown to be useful both in controlled numerical experiments and in applying to a real-life trucking problem.
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paper_title: Vehicle Routing with Cross-Docking

paper_content:

Over the past decade, cross-docking has emerged as an important material handling technology in transportation. A variation of the well-known Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), the VRP with Cross-Docking (VRPCD) arises in a number of logistics planning contexts. This paper addresses the VRPCD, where a set of homogeneous vehicles are used to transport orders from the suppliers to the corresponding customers via a cross-dock. The orders can be consolidated at the cross-dock but cannot be stored for very long because the cross-dock does not have long-term inventory-holding capabilities. The objective of the VRPCD is to minimize the total travel time while respecting time window constraints at the nodes and a time horizon for the whole transportation operation. In this paper, a mixed integer programming formulation for the VRPCD is proposed. A tabu search heuristic is embedded within an adaptive memory procedure to solve the problem. The proposed algorithm is implemented and tested on data sets provided by the Danish consultancy Transvision, and involving up to 200 pairs of nodes. Experimental results show that this algorithm can produce high-quality solutions (less than 5% away from optimal solution values) within very short computational time.
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paper_title: Quality, safety and sustainability in food distribution: a review of quantitative operations management approaches and challenges

paper_content:

The management of food distribution networks is receiving more and more attention, both in practice and in the scientific literature. In this paper, we review quantitative operations management approaches to food distribution management, and relate this to challenges faced by the industry. Here, our main focus is on three aspects: food quality, food safety, and sustainability. We discuss the literature on three decision levels: strategic network design, tactical network planning, and operational transportation planning. For each of these, we survey the research contributions, discuss the state of the art, and identify challenges for future research.
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paper_title: Combining Linear Programming and Heuristics to Solve a Transportation Problem for a Canning Company in Spain

paper_content:

This paper proposes an approach to solve logistics problems for a canning company situated in Navarra, Spain. Heuristic algorithms and linear programming routines are used, relying on the sweeping and Clarke-Wright algorithms for starting solutions that are improved by linear programming. Final outcomes focus on costs reduction and logistics decision-making support. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a mixed procedure combining exact and heuristic algorithms to solve routing problems. The model can be applied to other transportation problems in the agro-business industry.
---
paper_title: Ship routing and scheduling in the new millennium

paper_content:

We review research on ship routing and scheduling and related problems during the new millennium and provide four basic models in this domain. The volume of research in this area about doubles every decade as does the number of research outlets. We have found over a hundred new refereed papers on this topic during the last decade. Problems of wider scope have been addressed as well as more specialized ones. However, complex critical problems remain wide open and provide challenging opportunities for future research.
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paper_title: An adaptive guidance approach for the heuristic solution of a minimum multiple trip vehicle routing problem

paper_content:

One of the most important problems in combinatorial optimization is the well-known vehicle routing problem (VRP), which calls for the determination of the optimal routes to be performed by a fleet of vehicles to serve a given set of customers. Recently, there has been an increasing interest towards extensions of VRP arising from real-world applications. In this paper we consider a variant in which time windows for service at the customers are given, and vehicles may perform more than one route within a working shift. We call the resulting problem the minimum multiple trip VRP (MMTVRP), where a ''multiple trip'' is a sequence of routes corresponding to a working shift for a vehicle. The problem objective is to minimize the overall number of the multiple trips (hence the size of the required fleet), breaking ties in favor of the minimum routing cost. We propose an iterative solution approach based on the decomposition of the problem into simpler ones, each solved by specific heuristics that are suitably combined to produce feasible MMTVRP solutions. An adaptive guidance mechanism is used to guide the heuristics to possibly improve the current solution. Computational experiments have been performed on a set of real-world instances arising from a multi-regional scale distribution problem. The obtained results show that the proposed adaptive guidance mechanism is considerably effective, being able to reduce the overall number of required vehicles within a limited computing time.
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paper_title: A multi-compartment vehicle routing problem arising in the collection of olive oil in Tunisia

paper_content:

We introduce, model and solve to optimality a rich multi-product, multi-period and multi-compartment vehicle routing problem with a required compartment cleaning activity. This real-life application arises in the olive oil collection process in Tunisia, where regional collection offices dispose of a fleet of vehicles to collect one or several grades of olive oil from a set of producers. For each grade, the quantity offered by a producer changes dynamically over the planning horizon. We first provide a mathematical formulation of the problem, along with a set of known and new valid inequalities. We then propose an exact branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the problem. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm on real data sets under different transportation scenarios to demonstrate to our industrial partner the advantages of using multi-compartment vehicles.
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paper_title: Analysis and improvement of the product delivery system of a beer producer in Ankara

paper_content:

We outline our analysis of the product delivery system of a major beer producer in Ankara, Turkey. We demonstrate a savings potential of up to 25% of distribution costs from the implementation of a number of suggested improvements, most notably that of reducing the number of weekly deliveries to a portion of the customers, and of constructing a geographical partitioning of the city that ensures a balanced distribution of the delivery workload over the days of the week. A geographic information system (GIS) is used to extract coordinate and distance information to be used in the partitioning and sequencing problems. A discussion of the difficulties involved in implementing a GIS project in Turkey is included.
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paper_title: The Pallet-Packing Vehicle Routing Problem

paper_content:

This article introduces and solves a new transportation problem called the pallet-packing vehicle routing problem (PPVRP). PPVRP belongs to the category of practical routing models integrated with loading constraints, and assumes that customers raise a deterministic demand in the form of three-dimensional rectangular boxes. It is aimed at determining the optimal vehicle routes for satisfying customer demand. Regarding the packing aspects, transported boxes are not directly loaded into the vehicle-loading spaces; instead, they are feasibly stacked into pallets that are then loaded onto the vehicles before initiating their tours. Belonging to the class of combined routing and packing models, PPVRP is very hard to be optimally solved within manageable computational time; thus, we focused on heuristic approaches for both the routing and packing aspects of the problem. More specifically, PPVRP is solved via a local search metaheuristic strategy based on the regional aspiration criteria of tabu search. To determine feasible pallet-packing arrangements, we employ an efficient packing heuristic approach. The algorithm is accelerated by storing collected packing feasibility information into memory components. The proposed solution approach is tested on newly introduced benchmark instances derived from well-studied vehicle routing data sets, as well as real-world problems.
---
paper_title: Ship routing and scheduling in the new millennium

paper_content:

We review research on ship routing and scheduling and related problems during the new millennium and provide four basic models in this domain. The volume of research in this area about doubles every decade as does the number of research outlets. We have found over a hundred new refereed papers on this topic during the last decade. Problems of wider scope have been addressed as well as more specialized ones. However, complex critical problems remain wide open and provide challenging opportunities for future research.
---
paper_title: A computer-enabled solution procedure for food wholesalers' distribution decision in cities with a circular transportation infrastructure

paper_content:

This paper addresses the food distribution decision from a wholesaler's perspective, as the wholesalers are often faced with thorny issues such as when, where, how to deliver products at the lowest costs to best satisfy the retailers' changing needs. This research relies on a distribution problem encountered at Northern Grocery Company in Beijing as an example to develop a two-stage solution procedure and subsequent computer-enabled programs for identifying efficient vehicle routing alternatives. The solution process, which integrates heuristic search algorithms and an integer programming model, can be applied to a wide range of distribution problems with specified route durations and a circular transportation network structure as exemplified by City of Beijing.
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paper_title: A decision support system for a real vehicle routing problem

paper_content:

Abstract The vehicle routing problem has been widely studied in the literature, mainly because of the real world logistics and transportation problems related to it. In the present paper, a new two-stage exact approach for solving a real problem is shown, along with decision making software. In the first stage, all the feasible routes are generated by means of an implicit enumeration algorithm; afterwards, an integer programming model is designed to select in the second stage the optimum routes from the set of feasible routes. The integer model uses a number of 0–1 variables ranging from 2000 to 15,000 and gives optimum solutions in an average time of 60 seconds (for instances up to 60 clients). An interactive decision support system was also developed. The system was tested with a set of real instances and, in a worst-case scenario (up to 60 clients), the routes obtained ranged from a 7% to 12% reduction in the distance travelled and from a 9% to 11% reduction in operational costs.
---
paper_title: Integration of the Load-Matching and Routing Problem with Equipment Balancing for Small Package Carriers

paper_content:

Small package delivery is a multibillion dollar industry with complex planning decisions required to efficiently utilize costly resources and meet tight time requirements. The planning process is typically decomposed into sequential subproblems to establish tractability. This decomposition can greatly degrade solution quality. This paper therefore considers the integration of two closely related key subproblems: load matching and routing and equipment balancing. First, we identify critical challenges faced in trying to solve these problems. Then we present a novel modeling approach to address these challenges. Finally, we conclude with computational results from United Parcel Service, the world's largest package delivery company, demonstrating an improvement of approximately 5% over the company's existing methods for solving this pair of problems.
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paper_title: Streamlining the supply chain of the Hellenic sugar industry

paper_content:

Abstract The Hellenic Sugar Industry (HSI) is the largest state agricultural company and the single sugar-quota producer in Greece. HSI’s management has embarked upon a reorganization project to identify cost structures and operational inefficiencies. We report on the aspect of the project that addressed the redesign of HSI’s distribution network. The goal was to reduce the 3.5 million US$ transportation cost, which constituted almost 40% of the field operating expenses, and improve customer service. We have studied the supply chain, analyzed customer demand and logistics costs, and developed appropriate transportation models to derive optimal distribution practices. The approach incorporates all operating realities, including storage capacities at production-distribution facilities, routing costs, and actual flow patterns between supply chain nodes. Without resorting to radical restructuring of the existing logistics operations, but through optimal planning of inter-node material transfers, annual savings of almost one million US$ and improved demand coverage were achieved.
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paper_title: RutaRep: a computer package to design dispatching routes in the meat industry

paper_content:

In this paper we present a computer program that has been developed to design the dispatching routes of a medium-sized meat company in Spain. We have modelled the real problem as a variant of the vehicle routing problem with Time Windows and implemented a number of heuristic algorithms based on the most advanced solution techniques for this problem. These algorithms have been embedded in a computer package that is intended to be used as a decision support system for the distribution manager. The program runs under Windows System and is straightforward to use. We also present some computational experiences based on real instances provided by the company. This experience shows important improvements, in both global distance and customer service.
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paper_title: An iterated local search for the multi-commodity multi-trip vehicle routing problem with time windows

paper_content:

The Multi-Commodity Multi-Trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows calls for the determination of a routing planning to serve a set of customers that require products belonging to incompatible commodities. Two commodities are incompatible if they cannot be transported together into the same vehicle. Vehicles are allowed to perform several trips during the working day. The objective is to minimize the number of used vehicles. We propose an Iterated Local Search that outperforms the previous algorithm designed for the problem. Moreover, we conduct an analysis on the benefit that can be obtained introducing the multi-trip aspect at the fleet dimensioning level. Results on classical VRPTW instances show that, in some cases, the fleet can be halved.
---
paper_title: Combining Linear Programming and Heuristics to Solve a Transportation Problem for a Canning Company in Spain

paper_content:

This paper proposes an approach to solve logistics problems for a canning company situated in Navarra, Spain. Heuristic algorithms and linear programming routines are used, relying on the sweeping and Clarke-Wright algorithms for starting solutions that are improved by linear programming. Final outcomes focus on costs reduction and logistics decision-making support. The main contribution of this paper is the development of a mixed procedure combining exact and heuristic algorithms to solve routing problems. The model can be applied to other transportation problems in the agro-business industry.
---
paper_title: A vehicle routing problem with multi-trips and time windows for circular items

paper_content:

This article presents a vehicle routing problem with time windows, multiple trips, a limited number of vehicles and loading constraints for circular objects. This is a real problem experienced by a home delivery service company. A linear model is proposed to handle small problems and a two-step heuristic method to solve real size instances: the first step builds an initial solution through the modification of the Solomon I1 sequential insertion heuristic, and the second step improves the initial solution through the Tabu search algorithm proposed; in both steps, the problems related to circle packing with different sizes and bin packing are solved jointly with the use of heuristics. Finally, the computing results for two different sets of instances are presented.
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paper_title: Strategic Analysis of the Dairy Transportation Problem

paper_content:

The dairy transportation problem (DTP) consists of determining the best routes to be performed for collecting milk from farms and delivering it to processing plants. We study the particular case of the province of Quebec, where the Federation des producteurs de lait du Quebec is responsible for negotiating the transportation costs on behalf of producers. Several issues are highlighted in the actual process of designing contracts such as using historical data. We propose an approach based on scenario analysis that consists of revising both the steps and the information used to construct the routes. We develop a generalized tabu search algorithm that integrates the different characteristics of the DTP.
---
paper_title: Thirty Years of Inventory Routing

paper_content:

The inventory-routing problem (IRP) dates back 30 years. It can be described as the combination of vehicle-routing and inventory management problems, in which a supplier has to deliver products to a number of geographically dispersed customers, subject to side constraints. It provides integrated logistics solutions by simultaneously optimizing inventory management, vehicle routing, and delivery scheduling. Some exact algorithms and several powerful metaheuristic and matheuristic approaches have been developed for this class of problems, especially in recent years. The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive review of this literature, based on a new classification of the problem. We categorize IRPs with respect to their structural variants and the availability of information on customer demand.
---
paper_title: Regional hubs and multimodal logistics efficiency in the 21st century

paper_content:

The work assessed the connectivity between hub ports and allied transport networks in the move towards realizing sustainable transport system in the global multi-modal transport supply chain. The total transport chain connecting the sea, rail and road transport chain or the sea/rail/air chain modifies itself with renewed increasing costs, a good number of which includes additional dredging costs for regional hub ports, infrastructural and super structural costs, for modal and intermodal transfers, dry port construction costs, additional rail infrastructural costs among others.
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paper_title: Matheuristics: Hybridizing Metaheuristics and Mathematical Programming

paper_content:

Metaheuristics support managers in decision-making with robust tools that provide high-quality solutions to important applications in business, engineering, economics, and science in reasonable time frames, but finding exact solutions in these applications still poses a real challenge. However, because of advances in the fields of mathematical optimization and metaheuristics, major efforts have been made on their interface regarding efficient hybridization. This edited book will provide a survey of the state of the art in this field by providing some invited reviews by well-known specialists as well as refereed papers from the second Matheuristics workshop to be held in Bertinoro, Italy, June 2008. Papers will explore mathematical programming techniques in metaheuristics frameworks, and especially focus on the latest developments in Mixed Integer Programming in solving real-world problems. Topics to be covered will also include dual information and metaheuristics; metaheuristics for stochastic problems; MIP solvers as search components; decompositions and lower/upper bounds in metaheuristics/MIP codes (MH codes); and real-world case histories of successful MH applications.
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paper_title: The production routing problem: A review of formulations and solution algorithms

paper_content:

The production routing problem (PRP) combines the lot-sizing problem and the vehicle routing problem, two classical problems that have been extensively studied for more than half a century. The PRP is solved in an attempt to jointly optimize production, inventory, distribution and routing decisions and is thus a generalization of the inventory routing problem (IRP). Although the PRP has a complicated structure, there has been a growing interest in this problem during the past decade in both academia and industry. This article provides a comprehensive review of various solution techniques that have been proposed to solve the PRP. We attempt to provide an in-depth summary and discussion of different formulation schemes and of algorithmic and computational issues. Finally, we point out interesting research directions for further developments in production routing.
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paper_title: The pollution-routing problem

paper_content:

The amount of pollution emitted by a vehicle depends on its load and speed, among other factors. This paper presents the Pollution-Routing Problem (PRP), an extension of the classical Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) with a broader and more comprehensive objective function that accounts not just for the travel distance, but also for the amount of greenhouse emissions, fuel, travel times and their costs. Mathematical models are described for the PRP with or without time windows and computational experiments are performed on realistic instances. The paper sheds light on the tradeoffs between various parameters such as vehicle load, speed and total cost, and offers insight on economies of 'environmental-friendly' vehicle routing. The results suggest that, contrary to the VRP, the PRP is significantly more difficult to solve to optimality but has the potential of yielding savings in total cost.
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paper_title: Workforce Management in Periodic Delivery Operations

paper_content:

Service quality and driver efficiency in the delivery industry may be enhanced by increasing the regularity with which a driver visits the same set of customers. However, effectively managing a workforce of drivers may increase travel distance, a traditional metric of the vehicle routing problem VRP. This paper evaluates the effect that workforce management has on routing costs, providing insight for managerial decision making. The analysis is presented in the context of the period vehicle routing problem PVRP, an extension of the VRP with vehicle routes constructed to service customers according to preset visit frequencies over an established period of time. We develop models to apply workforce management principles. Through a computational study with standard PVRP test cases and real-world delivery data, we show that multiobjective PVRP models can achieve a balance between workforce management and travel distance goals. With the proper parameters in place, workforce management principles may be successfully applied without sacrificing other operational objectives.
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Title: Road-based goods transportation: a survey of real-world logistics applications from 2000 to 2015

Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: This section introduces the importance of transportation in modern society and outlines the classical problems in transportation like the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and the vehicle routing problem (VRP). It also states the contributions and the structure of the paper.

Section 2: Oil, gas and fuel applications
Description 2: This section covers various applications related to the transportation and delivery of oil, gas, and fuel, including case studies, specific challenges, and solution methods used for these problems.

Section 3: Retail Applications
Description 3: This section includes applications dealing with retail sector logistics, including supermarkets and consultancy services, focusing on challenges like time windows and loading constraints. 

Section 4: Waste Collection and Management
Description 4: This section discusses applications in waste collection and management, highlighting the role of municipal governments and the specific constraints and methodologies applied to these problems.

Section 5: Mail and small package delivery
Description 5: This section reviews logistics applications related to mail delivery and the delivery of small packages such as Internet orders, addressing various routing problems and their solutions.

Section 6: Food Distribution
Description 6: This section addresses the logistics of food distribution with its unique constraints such as limited shelf-life and health requirements, providing examples and methodologies used to solve these problems.

Section 7: Conclusions
Description 7: This section summarizes the main findings of the survey, discusses the engagement of various industries with scientific researchers, and outlines future research trends and applications in road-based goods transportation.