Journal of Advanced Operations Management - Special issue on Rich adn Real-Life Vehicle Routing Problems

Guest Editors: Angel A. Juan, Javier Faulin, Scott E. Grasman, Kannan Govindan

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) have been extensively studied by researchers and practitioners during the last decades. Being complex problems with numerous and relevant potential applications, researchers from the fields of computer science, operations research and industrial engineering have developed very efficient algorithms, both of exact and approximate nature, to deal with different types of VRPs.

However, most of these methods are still far from being tremendously applicable to real-life scenarios, either because they are too complex to be implemented in practice without the direct support of the experts who developed them, or because they solve only an oversimplified version of a realistic routing problem.

This special issue aims at collecting recent works related to the development of efficient yet relatively simple algorithms that can be employed in practice to solve realistic VRPs with non-standard objective functions and/or constraints, as well as case studies regarding the applications of existing methods to solving real-life VRPs.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

Heterogeneous VRPs
Stochastic VRPs
Multi-depot VRPs
VRPs with multiple driving ranges
Inventory routing problems
Green VRPs
Online VRPs
Computer issues in rich VRPs
VRPs with non-smooth objective functions
VRPs with soft constraints
Real-life applications of vehicle routing
VRPs with asymmetric costs
Integration of GIS technologies and VRPs
Simulation-based algorithms for VRPs
Software for realistic VRPs

Submission deadline: 15 March, 2013

More details: http://www.inderscience.com/info/ingeneral/cfp.php?id=1830