Imagine that you now manage a larger fulfillment center. You still need to deliver packages to a list of customers, but now you have a fleet of several vehicles at your disposal. What is the best way to deliver the packages to the customers using these vehicles?
This is an example of VRP, a generalization of the TSP described in the previous section. The basic VRP consists of the following three components:
- The list of locations that need to be visited
- The number of vehicles
- The location of the depot, which is used as the starting and ending point for each one of the vehicles
The problem has numerous variations, such as several depot locations, time-critical deliveries, different types of vehicles (with varying capacity and varying fuel consumption, for instance), and many more.
The goal of the problem is to minimize the cost, which can also be defined in many...
