Local search in physical distribution management

Physical distribution management presents a variety of decision making problems at three levels of strategic, tactical and operational planning. The importance of effective and efficient distribution management is evident from its associated costs. Physical distribution management at the operational level, which is considered in this paper is responsible for an important fraction of the total distribution costs. Not surprisingly, there is a growing demand for planning systems that produce economical routes. Enormous theoretical as well as practical advances have been made, in the last decade. Some of the resulting vehicle and scheduling models will be discussed in this paper, like vehicle routing problem with time window and the pickup and delivery problem with time window.