Guest editorial: Recent trends in vehicle routing

Battarra, Maria; Eglese, Richard; Erdoğan, Güneş · 2014 · Crossref

DOI: 10.1002/net.21593

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Summary

This guest editorial introduces a special issue of the journal *Networks*, featuring research presented at the second VeRoLog conference held at the University of Southampton in July 2013. The conference, organized by Chris Potts, Julia Bennell, Maria Battarra, and Güneş Erdoğan, attracted 113 participants and received 105 presentations. The selected papers reflect the state-of-the-art in vehicle routing research, addressing diverse challenges ranging from timing complexities and inventory management to waste collection and school bus scheduling. The first featured study, by Vidal, Crainic, Gendreau, and Prins, addresses timing problems across various fields, including vehicle routing and production scheduling. The authors propose a classification scheme and complexity categorization for these problems, emphasizing the critical role of re-optimization algorithms. They introduce a formal framework for describing timing decisions within sequences of activities. Avella, Boccia, and Wolsey examine the Vendor Managed Inventory Routing Problem, which integrates lot-sizing for customers with vehicle routing over time periods. They analyze "Order-Up" and "Maximum Level" replenishment policies and develop formulations leveraging specific test instance properties. Their work includes the introduction of two new families of valid inequalities and provides computational experience with benchmark instances. Manerba and Mansini focus on the Multi-Vehicle Traveling Purchaser Problem with Pairwise Incompatibility Constraints. This problem involves selecting suppliers to minimize purchasing and travel costs while adhering to restrictions on incompatible product pairs. The authors present a branch-and-cut algorithm and a four-step constructive heuristic utilizing Beam Search to solve this complex selection and routing challenge. Rodrigues and Ferreira address a practical waste collection routing problem in Monção, Portugal, characterized by limited multiple landfills and a heterogeneous fleet. They analyze three scenarios with varying disposal sites and vehicle types, providing specific formulations for each. Their results demonstrate that the proposed solutions offer viable and efficient alternatives to existing routes. Bektas and Lysgaard investigate the balancing of vehicle routes through lower and upper bounds on route durations. They propose a new exact algorithm combining mixed-integer linear programming and cutting planes. Computational experiments utilize connectivity constraints from Desrochers-Laporte, Miller-Tucker-Zemlin, and single-commodity flow models, tested on TSPLIB instances. Finally, Bögl, Doerner, and Parragh study the school bus routing and scheduling problem allowing for student transfers. They analyze the trade-off between service quality degradation due to transfers and the benefit of reduced average ride times. Their findings indicate that allowing transfers significantly decreases total operating costs while maintaining average and maximum ride times comparable to non-transfer solutions. The editorial concludes by expressing hope that this issue will shape future vehicle routing research and anticipates continued success for the VeRoLog conference series.

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