Vehicle Routing and Job Shop Scheduling: What`s the Difference?

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Despite a number of similarities, vehicle routing problems and scheduling problems are typically solved with different techniques. In this paper, we undertake a systematic study of problem characteristics that differ between vehicle routing and scheduling problems in order to identify those that are important for the performance of typical vehicle routing and scheduling techniques. In particular, we find that the addition of temporal constraints among visits or the addition of tight vehicle specialization constraints significantly improves the performance of scheduling techniques relative to vehicle routing techniques.