The purpose of this paper is to study the periodic arc-routing problem when the arcs of a network behave as customers, and sufficient material is delivered so that each achieves its desired inventory level. Therefore, routing and inventory decisions are made simultaneously. Applications include...

The multi-vehicle covering tour problem (m-CTP) involves finding a minimum-length set of vehicle routes passing through a subset of vertices, subject to constraints on the length of each route and the number of vertices that it contains, such that each vertex not included in any route lies...

We studied the following organization for the letter and parcel pick-up and delivery problem in an urban environment: the working day is divided in time periods during which each vehicle starts from a sorting center, travels to a precise area of the region, picks up and delivers letters and...

Winter road maintenance operations involve a host of decision-making problems at the strategic, tactical, operational, and real-time levels. Those operations include spreading of chemicals and abrasives, snow plowing, loading snow into trucks, and hauling snow to disposal sites. In this paper,...

We present an overview of continuous approximation models that have been developed for freight distribution problems. A taxonomy of six classes is used to differentiate the problems and a brief review of each paper is provided. This paper stresses important principles and key results from the...

This article presents a new algorithm, based on bin packing algorithms, that determines vehicle routing costs on networks with certain geographic characteristics. Requiring very little data and computation time, the algorithm is used to test the impact of adding flexibility to a retailer's...

This paper studies the interactions between crane handling and truck transportation in a maritime container terminal by addressing them simultaneously. Yard trucks are shared among different ships, which helps to reduce empty truck trips in the terminal area. The problem is formulated as a...

Relocation of items in a warehousing system is usually used when the handling machines become the bottleneck. This paper addresses the optimization problem of relocation in a warehouse with dynamic operating policy. An integer linear programming formulation is proposed. A two-stage heuristic...