{"product_id":"9780387777771","title":"The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges","description":"Theoretical research and practical applications in the field of vehicle routing started in 1959 with the truck dispatching problem posed by Dantzig and Ramser [1]: find 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 field 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":"Springer US","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46255274295537,"sku":"9780387777771","price":379.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0674\/5433\/7265\/files\/9780387777771_p0.jpg?v=1764982530","url":"https:\/\/shop.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780387777771","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble","version":"1.0","type":"link"}