Single Vehicle Round-trip Routing

Abstract

In the single vehicle routing problem a single vehicle is used to serve a set of customers. The vehicle travels on an underlying network consisting of a number of nodes and a number of arcs and edges. If the customers are located in the nodes, the problem is said to be a node routing problem. If the customers are located nearly uniformly along an arc or edge then the problem is said to be an arc routing problem. Node routing is more coabstrammon in supply chain planning, where the customer correspond to individual customers or facilities in the supply chain. Arc routing is common in public service applications such as mail delivery, garbage collection, and snow removal. The single vehicle Roundtrip node routing problem is more commonly known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) “TSP” . The single vehicle arc routing problem in which the vehicle has to visit a subset of the arcs and edges is also known as the Rural Postman Problem (RPP) RPP . If all the edges and arcs have to be visited then the problem is known as the Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) CPP . The remainder of this chapter will be focused on the TSP.