Suppose that one is given a Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) on a road network, but does not have access to detailed information about that network. One could obtain a heuristic solution by solving a modified version of the problem, in which true road distances are replaced with planar Euclidean distances. We test this heuristic, on two different types of VRP, using real road network data for twelve cities across the world. We also give guidelines on the kind of VRP for which this heuristic can be expected to give good results.

中文翻译：

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道路网络上的车辆路线：欧几里得近似有多好？

假设某人在道路网络上收到了车辆路由问题（VRP），但没有访问该网络的详细信息。可以通过解决问题的修改版本来获得启发式解决方案，其中用平面欧几里得距离代替真实的道路距离。我们使用全球十二个城市的真实道路网络数据，在两种不同类型的VRP上测试了这种启发式方法。我们还提供了有关VRP种类的指南，可以期望这种启发式方法可以产生良好的效果。