A LOCATION BASED HEURISTIC FOR GENERAL ROUTING-PROBLEMS

We present a general framework for modeling routing problems based on formulating them as a traditional location problem called the capacita ted concentrator location problem. We apply this framework to two clas sical routing problems: the capacitated vehicle routing problem and th e inventory routing problem. In the former case, the heuristic is prov en to be asymptotically optimal for any distribution of customer deman ds and locations. Computational experiments show that the heuristic pe rforms well for both problems and, in most cases, outperforms all publ ished heuristics on a set of standard test problems.