Solving Vehicle Routing Problems using an engineering solution

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) have received a lot of attention in the recent years, both from a theoretical and practical perspective. Many variations of the problem have been studied: capacitated VRP, with multiple depots, with time windows etc. To this day, exact algorithms can only solve a relatively small number of cases with highly variable computational times, and heuristics therefore remains the only reliable approach for the solution in practical instances.
This paper analyses the differences between the theoretical and the practical approach to the solution of VRPs, and also describes an algorithm that has been efficiency-tested in the solution of a real-life VRP.