Central food markets are places of daily trading between clients and small and medium enterprises and understandably a field of massive logistics operations chiefly in the area of distribution. Since most enterprises have common characteristics, distribution logistics operations can be substantially aided by developing an Application Service Provider (ASP) that would offer services of distribution logistics by appropriately solving the fleet management problem. ASPs constitute a new scientific area of information systems applications developed in order to support semi-structured or unstructured decisions, paying much attention on the spatial dimension of data to be analysed, such as the location and shape of, and relationships among, geographic features. This paper presents an ASP to coordinate and disseminate tasks and related information for solving the vehicle routing problem using appropriate metaheuristic techniques. Its architecture involves a Java Web applet equipped with interactive communication capabilities between peripheral software tools. The ASP was developed in distributed software fashion technology for all computer platforms utilizing a Web browser, focusing on the detailed road network of Athens and the needs of the Athens Central Food Market enterprises. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.