Rich vehicle routing in theory and practice

The contribution of this paper is a comparison of the state-of-the-art of academic research on and commercial software for modelling and solving vehicle routing problems. To this end, the paper presents a compact review of vehicle routing literature and an overview of the results of a recent study of commercial vehicle routing software systems with respect to the problem features these systems are able to handle and the solution methods the systems use for automatic generation of vehicle routes. In this way, existing application and research gaps are identified.