Vehicle routing is a central task in a large number of private and public corporations (see, e.g., Golden, Raghavan, and Wasil [30]). Tours have to be planned in very diverse sectors of the economy, not only in the logistics and transport business but in virtually all industrial sectors producing physical goods. Variants of the vehicle routing problem manifest in a remarkably wide range of commercial and non-commercial enterprises: from waste/refuse collection to retail distribution; from construction material delivery planning to postal and express delivery routing; from inbound manufacturing component transportation to finished car distribution; from in-home primary health care service to hospital operations; from transportation network optimization to third Party Logistics (3PL) operation scheduling; and from bulk collection and delivery planning to passenger transportation routing. Hence, vehicle routing is key to logistics efficiency in industry, the public sector, and society in general. The high complexity of the vehicle routing problem renders purely human planning inadequate for most applications. Typically, humanmade plans have a large potential for improvement. Also, non-assisted planning occupies valuable human resources. Therefore, high-quality software tools for decision support in vehicle routing are crucial to effective and efficient planning in many sectors of society.Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) in their many guises have been the subject of intensive study for more than half a century now (see Laporte [41]). These research efforts have led to the development of a variety of models and solution algorithms and the publication of thousands of scientific papers. Our ability to solve VRPs has increased tremendously over the past half century due to a combination of better VRP methods and the general performance improvement of computers. These results have, together with the progress of key enabling technologies, led to the emergence of numerous software companies worldwide, selling commercial vehicle routing software tools and accompanying services (see Hallamäki et al. [32], Drexl [13], and Partyka and Hall [50]). Among the 351 Downloaded 12/15/14 to 132.236.27.111. Redistribution subject to SIAM license or copyright; see http://www.siam.org/journals/ojsa.php