Routing vehicles to minimize fuel consumption

Abstract

We consider a generalization of the capacitated vehicle routing problem known as the cumulative vehicle routing problem in the literature. Cumulative VRPs are known to be a simple model for fuel consumption in VRPs. We examine four variants of the problem, and give constant factor approximation algorithms. Our results are based on a well-known heuristic of partitioning the traveling salesman tours and the use of the averaging argument.