Transportation Routing Problem—A Survey

Abstract

In the Transportation Routing Problem, a manager or analyst must schedule an existing fleet of vehicles, each with a capacity constraint, to visit a set of stops or destinations and deliver or pick up goods or services at each stop such that one and only one vehicle visits each stop. The problem is to assign these vehicles to the stops so as to minimize total cost which is assumed to be directly proportional to the total distance traveled. Much work has been done on this problem and heuristic as well as optimal seeking methods have been developed. This paper examines the problem, develops a standard formulation, reviews the literature on the problem, and mentions some new approaches.