The variety and complexity of the transportation field is reflected by the richness of research areas, models, methods, and software. The ten chapters of Fleet Management and Logistics describe some of the most recent operations-research advances in the field of transportation and logistics. The first four chapters deal with various versions of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), probably the most central model in distribution management. The fourth chapter discusses the Inventory Routing Problem, a variant of the VRP that combines routing and customer resupplying decisions. Growing competition in the area of logistics has forced several firms to pay closer attention to customer service and timeliness of deliveries. Dynamic real-time vehicle routing and dispatching is central to several fast-growing sectors such as emergency services, repairman dispatching, express courier delivery, and dial-a-ride transportation, as well as truckload and container operations. These fleet management issues are discussed in Chapters Five, Six and Seven.
Chapters Eight and Nine address the crew scheduling problem faced by all airlines, combined locations-routing problems, and simultaneous routing decisions. In the final chapter the authors review the area of parallel metaheuristics, and provide new insight by studying commonalities among parallel implementations across several types of metaheuristics.