Aspects of routing problems in media product distribution

Efficient construction and revision of delivery routes for newspapers and other media products is critical. We illustrate important aspects of routing problems in this industry. Typically, the goal is to optimize on several criteria that are partly in conflict: number of routes, delivery costs, route balancing, and route segregation. We describe how these aspects may be modeled and solved. Results from computational experiments on industrial cases and standard benchmarks are presented. The importance of cloud computing and parallel algorithms for modern computer architectures is described.