VIP'08 Oslo, Norway 12-14 June 2008

International Workshop on Vehicle Routing in Practice

The goal of VIP’08 is to present recent results as well as exchange and create ideas for research on the VRP and related problems. Participation is by invitation only. There will be 30 minute talks in a single stream. Discussions are invited, also based on provocative statements and speculative ideas. Possibly, there will be a panel discussion. VIP'08 marks the end of two VRP-related applied research projects at SINTEF: DOiT and EDGE. It also coincides with a visit from Michel Gendreau.

The VIP'08 venue is the Soria Moria Conference center some 20 minutes from downtown Oslo.  Rooms will be reserved for all participants from June 12 - June 14. A block of rooms has been reserved also for arrival June 11.

The workshop is sponsored by the Smartrans program of the Research Council of Norway and SINTEF ICT.

Among the main themes for VIP'08 are:

  • real-life problems
  • decision-support aspects
  • new VRP variants
  • generic models and solution methods
  • large-size instances
  • stochastic and dynamic problems
  • hybrid methods
  • adaptable methods and hyperheuristics
  • search limitation
  • parallel methods
  • multi-level search
  • collaborative search

We would like to address the following questions:

  • how industrially relevant is the research conducted in the scientific community?
  • what are the important research directions?
  • how far can we go?