Purpose - To provide empirical evidence on the level of savings that can be attained by joint route planning and how these savings depend on specific market characteristics.Design/methodology/approach - Joint route planning is a measure that companies can take to decrease the costs of their...

We propose a tabu search meta-heuristic for the Time-dependent Multi-zone Multi-trip Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows. Two types of neighborhoods, corresponding to the two sets of decisions of the problem, together with a strategy controlling the selection of the neighborhood type for...

In real life distribution of goods, relatively long service times may make it difficult to serve all requests during regular working hours. These difficulties are even greater if the beginning of the service in each demand site must occur within a time window and violations of routing time...

This paper describes an algorithm for producing visually attractive and operationally robust solutions to a real-life vehicle routing problem with time windows. Visually attractive and operationally robust solutions are usually synonymous with compact, nonoverlapping routes with little or no...

For VRP with time windows (VRPTW) solved by conventional cluster-first and route-second approach, temporal information is usually considered with vehicle routing but ignored in the process of clustering. We propose an alternative approach based on spatiotemporal partitioning to solving a...