ABSTRACT
Real-life vehicle-routing problems (VRP for short) have capacity constraints on the vehicles, and are therefore more difficult to solve than the basic traveling salesman problem. We show however in this section that many solution methods for the TSP can easily be extended to the VRP. The purpose of this section is not to list all existing solution methods for the VRP, but simply to provide an outline of some of the best known. The heuristic solution methods can be classified in the following categories:
• constructive methods; • two-phase methods; • local-search methods.
