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Very few distribution studies have dealt with combined location-routing problems, the problems of locating depots from which customers are served by tours rather than individual trips.

This paper gives a survey of methods solving combined location-routing problems. Some methods are analyzed and three new heuristic methods are developed, implemented and compared.

A newspaper delivery system consisting of 4500 customers is solved. The results seem to indicate that an alternate location-allocation-savings procedure and a saving-drop procedure are promising.