Physical distribution activities and vehicle routing problems in logistics management:: a case study

Abstract

The vehicle routing path (VRP) is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) and therefore difficult to solve. The fact that VRP is both of theoretical and practical interest (owing to its real-world applications), explains the amount of attention given to the VRP by researchers during past years. Research on the development of heuristics for the VRP has made considerable progress since the first algorithms were proposed in the early 1960s. Several families of heuristics have been proposed for the VRP. The purpose of this paper is to review some of the most important families of heuristics for the VRP. At the end, the survey presents the solution method used for a small-scale case study in a logistic company in Turkey.