Vehicle Routing for Small Package Delivery and Pickup Services

Small package shipping is a vital component of national and international transportation. This chapter gives an overview of such services by discussing the operations of a “typical” service day. We compare and contrast the characteristics of the routing problem encountered in small package shipping with the classical vehicle routing problem. The discussion of these routing issues also leads us to describe several new variants and offshoots of the classical vehicle routing problem that may be of interest to researchers.