The concept of bounded highway dimension was developed to capture observed properties of the metrics of road networks. We show that a graph with bounded highway dimension, for any vertex, can be embedded into a a graph of bounded treewidth in such a way that the distance between @math and @math is preserved up to an additive error of @math times the distance from @math or @math to the selected vertex. We show that this theorem yields a PTAS for Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the input specifies a depot and a set of clients, each with a location and demand; the output is a set of depot-to-depot tours, where each client is visited by some tour and each tour covers at most @math units of client demand. Our PTAS can be extended to handle penalties for unvisited clients. We extend this embedding result to handle a set @math of distinguished vertices. The treewidth depends on @math , and the distance between @math and @math is preserved up to an additive error of @math times the distance from @math and @math to @math . This embedding result implies a PTAS for Multiple Depot Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing: the tours can go from one depot to another. The embedding result also implies that, for fixed @math , there is a PTAS for @math -Center in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize @math such that there exist @math vertices (the centers) such that every vertex is within distance @math of some center. Similarly, for fixed @math , there is a PTAS for @math -Median in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize the sum of distances to the @math centers.
In a capacitated routing problem, the objective is to minimize the total distance travelled by vehicles of limited capacity to serve a set of customers that are located in the Euclidean plane. We develop asymptotically optimal bounds and heuristics for this problem, under the assumption that the capacity of a vehicle is expressed in terms of an upper bound on the number of customers that it can serve. The analysis culminates in an algorithm that, for a given capacity and given (epsilon), will find a solution with relative error at most (epsilon) in time polynomial in the number of customers.