Bräysy, O., Dullaert, W. and Nakari, P. (2009). The potential of optimization in communal routing problems: case studies from Finland Journal of Transport Geography, 17(6):484--490.
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Affiliated author
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Publication year2009
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JournalJournal of Transport Geography
In many European countries, municipalities offer their inhabitants a wide variety of social services. In this paper we will focus on efficiently scheduling home care, transportation of the elderly, and home meal delivery. These so-called municipal or communal routing problems can be modeled as different variants of the vehicle routing problem, a well-known optimization problem from the literature. We present a focused literature review and report on case studies using Finnish data. The computational results show that there is a significant potential for cost savings for all applications considered.