INTRODUCTION

Vehicle routing is the problem of determining the best routes and/or schedules for pickup/delivery of passengers or goods in a distribution system.

Some frequently encountered examples of vehicle routing are given next:

• determining the route of a truck that is to deliver orders to customers dispersed in a geographical area.
• routing of passenger cars to transport elderly or disabled passengers in a metropolitan area.
• routing of cargo ships to transport loads between seaports
• routing and dispatching of multi-load automated guided vehicles to transport work-in process between workstations in a factory