{"product_id":"vehicle-routing-problem-latest-advances-and-new-challenges-book-bruce-l-golden-9780387777771","title":"The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges","description":"Theoretical research and practical applications in the ?eld of vehicle routing started in 1959 with the truck dispatching problem posed by Dantzig and Ramser [1]: ?nd 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. The authorsproclaimed:“Nopractical applications of the method have been made as yet. ” In the nearly 50 years since the Dantzig and Ramser paper appeared, work in the ?eld has exploded dramatically. Today, a Google Scholar search of the words vehicle routing problem (VRP) yields more than 21,700 entries. The June 2006 issue of OR\/MS Today provided a survey of 17 vendors of commercial routing software whose packages are currently capable of solving average-size problems with 1,000 stops, 50 routes, and two-hour hard-time windows in two to ten minutes [2]. In practice, vehicle routing may be the single biggest success story in operations research. For example, each day 103,500 drivers at UPS follow computer-generated routes. The drivers visit 7. 9 million customers and handle an average of 15. 6 million packages [3].","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49729765212433,"sku":"NGR9780387777771","price":163.49,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52482073854225,"sku":"NLS9780387777771","price":249.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0387777776.jpg?v=1750878675","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/products\/vehicle-routing-problem-latest-advances-and-new-challenges-book-bruce-l-golden-9780387777771","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}