Strategic Vehicle Routing in Practice — A pure Software Problem or a Problem Requiring Scientific Advice? Routing Problems of Daily Deliveries to the Same Customers

For improving their delivery tours, newspaper and magazine wholesalers require a practice-oriented solution to the strategic vehicle routing problem. The main tool to achieve this goal is a special software but if the most is to be gained from the existing optimization potential, it is necessary to have a detailed knowledge of the problem in its real context. This knowledge can be easily acquired by solving the problem in dialog. This paper discusses a practicable approach to the press distribution problem. It presents the situations where software tools are helpful and how they should be applied. Furthermore, a working-in-dialog procedure is described.