Transportation problems involving routing and loading at the same time are currently a hot topic in combinatorial optimization. The interest of researchers and practitioners is motivated by the intrinsic difficulty of this research area, which combines two computationally hard problems, and by its practical relevance in important real world applications. | Yugoslav Journal of Operations Research 23 (2013) Number 3, 311-326 DOI: REVIEW AN ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF COMBINED ROUTING AND LOADING PROBLEMS Manuel IORI DISMI, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Via Amendola 2, 42122 Reggio Emilia, Italy, Silvano MARTELLO DEI “Guglielmo Marconi”, University of Bologna, Viale Risorgimento 2, 40136 Bologna, Italy, Received: March 2013 / Accepted: June 2013 Abstract: Transportation problems involving routing and loading at the same time are currently a hot topic in combinatorial optimization. The interest of researchers and practitioners is motivated by the intrinsic difficulty of this research area, which combines two computationally hard problems, and by its practical relevance in important real world applications. This annotated bibliography aims at collecting, in a systematic way, the most relevant results obtained in the area of vehicle routing with loading constraints, with the objective of stimulating further research in this promising area. Keywords: Vehicle routing, Loading, Two-dimensional packing, Three-dimensional packing, Traveling salesman, Pickup and delivery. MSC: 90B06, 90C10, 90C27, 90C59. 1. INTRODUCTION Many activities in freight transportation involve two basic optimization issues that have been intensively studied in the last decades: finding the optimal routes to deliver goods, and determine the best way for loading such goods on the vehicles used M. Iori, S. Martello / An Annotated Bibliography 312 for transportation. The great majority of problems arising in these two areas belong to the class of (strongly) NP -hard problems, and are very challenging in practice. Up to recent years, most of the research was concentrated on solving these problems separately, while now, their combined solution has attracted a number of researchers and practitioners and led to interesting theoretical, as well as practical results. To our .
