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Challenges and Advances in A Priori Routing

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The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges

Part of the book series: Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces ((ORCS,volume 43))

An a priori route is a route which specifies an ordering of all possible customers that a particular driver may need to visit. The driver may then skip those customers on the route who do not receive a delivery. Despite the prevalence of a priori routing, construction of these routes still presents considerable challenges. Exact methods are limited to small problem sizes, and even heuristic methods are intractable in the face of real-world-sized instances. In this chapter, we will review some of the ideas that have emerged in recent years to help solve these larger instances. We focus on the probabilistic traveling salesman problem and the recently introduced probabilistic traveling salesman problem with deadlines and discuss how objective-function approximations can reduce computation time without significantly impacting solution quality. We will also present several open research questions in a priori routing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tippie College of Business Department of Management Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1994

    Ann Melissa Campbell & Barrett W. Thomas

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  1. Ann Melissa Campbell
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  2. Barrett W. Thomas
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Correspondence to Ann Melissa Campbell .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Bruce Golden  & S. Raghavan  & 

  2. American University, Washington, DC, USA

    Edward Wasil

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Campbell, A.M., Thomas, B.W. (2008). Challenges and Advances in A Priori Routing. In: Golden, B., Raghavan, S., Wasil, E. (eds) The Vehicle Routing Problem: Latest Advances and New Challenges. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces, vol 43. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-77778-8_6

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