General Presentation of Vehicle Routing Problems
Résumé
This chapter introduces what the logistics management and the combinatorial optimization are, before giving a formal definition of the capacitated vehicle routing problems (CVRP). Metaheuristics are mainly developed for real-world problems, which often attain notably high levels of complexity, although they are not able to certify the optimality of the solutions they find. The classical vehicle VRP is an important problem in the fields of logistics and transportation. It consists of the determination of the optimal set of routes to be performed by a vehicle fleet to serve the demand of a given set of customers. With the traveling salesman problem (TSP), it is one of the most important and studied combinatorial optimization problems. The chapter also describes the typical characteristics of these problems by considering their main components, constraints and possible objectives to be optimized.