Spatial decision support systems for vehicle routing

摘要

The vehicle routing field is a well-developed area of management science application. There is increasing recognition that effective decision-making in this field requires the incorporation of vehicle routing techniques into a decision support system (DSS). In order to provide decision support for a wide range of problems, routing techniques should be combined with systems that can take advantage of new technologies. These include spatial techniques drawn from the field of geographic information systems (GIS). A synthesis of appropriate algorithms and a GIS based computer system is identified as being necessary for effective decision support for the vehicle routing problem.