Introduction to Tour Planning: Vehicle Routing and Related Problems

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss different characteristics and variants of routing problems. First, an introduction to classic static routing problems is given. Since RDOPG applications can be modeled as a variant of the dynamic vehicle routing problem (DVRP) in which new requests dynamically arrive, variants of the VRP and the DVRP make up the main part of this chapter. Different classifications in the literature that deal with differences between static and dynamic routing problems are described. Since dynamic problems can be distinguished according to the type of relevant information revelation, appropriate existing classifications are also presented. In order to aggregate the results that are relevant for the considered RDOPG applications from these classifications, a unified approach for classifying routing problems is developed. According to this classification, different variants of VRPs which are known in the literature are introduced. In order to evaluate the performance of dynamic routing approaches, two different measures known in the literature are presented. Finally, a general classification scheme for characterizing routing problems is presented and extended with regard to additional characteristics which are relevant for RDOPG applications.KeywordsTravel Salesman ProblemCompetitive RatioPenalty CostVehicle Route ProblemTransportation ProcessThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.