Routing propane deliveries

Abstract

This chapter is about solving the problem of propane deliveries. It is commonly viewed as a representative problem of a much larger family of hard problems of considerable practical significance. This problem has been on the front burner of the logistics academic and practitioners community for over twenty years. In this chapter I attempt to describe the practices of a propane distribution company and to summarize the literature on the more general topic of inventory routing. It is one person's point of view and I apologize ex ante for my unavoidable biases. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.