The Capacitated Vehicle Routing problem is to find a minimum-cost set of
tours that collectively cover clients in a graph, such that each tour starts
and ends at a specified depot and is subject to a capacity bound on the number
of clients it can serve. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time
approximation scheme (PTAS) for instances in which the input graph is planar
and the capacity is bounded. Previously, only a quasipolynomial-time
approximation scheme was known for these instances. To obtain this result, we
show how to embed planar graphs into bounded-treewidth graphs while preserving,
in expectation, the client-to-client distances up to a small additive error
proportional to client distances to the depot