When academic theory meets industry reality: The case of vehicle routing problems

Rincon-Garcia, Nicolas, Waterson, Ben and Cherrett, Tom (2013) When academic theory meets industry reality: The case of vehicle routing problems. 18th Annual Logistics Research Network Conference, Birmingham, United Kingdom. 03 - 05 Sep 2013.

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem (where, in the basic formulation, a set of Nv vehicles must be assigned to visit NL locations with the minimum total route length) is one of the most widely studied theoretical problems in logistics; over the years many variations have been proposed, including for example capacity constrained problems for heterogeneous vehicle fleets, time constrained ‘delivery window’ problems which restrict the freedom of the schedules, and congested network problems which attempt to reflect time variant travel times between locations. However, there remains (at least anecdotally) a feeling that theoretical models cannot be used in reality as they do not reflect the real constraints imposed by real life logistics and legislation. This paper presents a review of state-of-the-art worldwide review of vehicle routing problem formulations and solution techniques, together with a survey of logistics companies across a range of industrial sectors to quantify their need for vehicle routing models and their use (if any) of supporting solution algorithms (either in house or commercial software). The findings show that developments in operational research techniques offer efficient solutions for a range of vehicle routing problems, but that the industry perception is that further research is still required in time-dependent models in order to face constraints that are affected by congestion.

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Contributors

Author: Ben Waterson

University divisions

• Southampton Marine & Maritime Institute (pre 2018 reorg)
• Transportation Group (pre 2018 reorg)

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