Guest editorial to the Special Issue “Routing and Logistics” (VeRoLog 2012)

Vehicle routing is one of the most active research areas in combinatorial optimization since more than 50 years. Starting from the seminal paper by Dantzig and Ramser in 1959, literally hundreds of papers introduced innovative exact and heuristic algorithms for the many variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The VRP is at the core of logistics and supply chain management, as well as of people transportation activities. Thus, the practical importance of optimization models and algorithms development for the VRP is evident from the impact of freight and people transportation in the modern world, both from an economic and an environmental point of view. Moreover, the field is not only related to terrestrial transportation of goods and people by means of vans, trucks and buses, but also to other modes of transport such as rail, naval and air transport and their interaction within intermodal networks.