On the vehicle routing problem

Abstract

In the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), as in the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), we have a metric space of customer points, and we have to visits all customers. Additionally, every customer has a demand, a quantity of a commodity that has to be delivered in our vehicle from a single point called the depot. Because the vehicle capacity is bounded, we need to return to the depot each time we run out of the commodity to distribute. We describe a fully polynomial time algorithm with approximation 2.5, we also modify this algorithm for the on-line version of VRP, the randomized version has competitive ratio of 2.5 on the average, and the deterministic version has ratio 4. We also describe 2 approximation for a restricted version of the problem. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.