"Slack Induction by String Removals for Vehicle Routing Problems" Jan Christiaens and Greet Vanden Berghe Dedicated algorithm and modelling improvements continue to advance the state-of-the-art with respect to vehicle routing problems (VRPs). Despite these academic achievements, solving large VRP instances sufficiently fast for real-life applicability remains challenging. By exploiting VRP solution characteristics in an effective manner, this paper arrives at a powerful and fast optimization heuristic. Its primary contributions are threefold: a ruin method, a recreate method and a fleet minimization procedure. The ruin method functions via adjacent string removal, introducing with it a novel property regarding vehicle routing problems which we term spatial slack, while the recreate method is categorised as greedy insertion with blinks. Combining these results in SISRs: a powerful ruin & recreate approach. The eet minimization procedure, meanwhile, introduces an absences-based acceptance criterion which serves as a complementary optimization component for when minimizing the number of vehicles constitutes the primary VRP objective. Together, these three elements provide a suite of simple, powerful and easily-reproducible algorithmic methods which are not only successfully applied to the CVRP but also for a wide range of related problems such as pickup and delivery problems as well as others which include time windows. SISRs serves to strip back the layers of complexity and specialisation synonymous with the trend of algorithmic development throughout recent decades. Moreover, such simplicity and reproducibility are shown to not necessarily come at the expense of solution quality, with SISRs consistently outperforming alternative general approaches as well as dedicated single-purpose methods, obtaining highly competitive results and new best results, particularly for large-scale instances. Finally, aside from performance-related criteria, SISRs also serves to showcase a fresh perspective with respect to vehicle routing problems more generally, introducing a range of new terminology and procedures which it is hoped will invigorate further research and innovation.