The Vehicle Routing Problem: State-of-the-Art Classification and Review

Abstract

Transportation planning has been established as a key topic in the literature and social production practices. An increasing number of researchers are studying vehicle routing problems (VRPs) and their variants considering real-life applications and scenarios. Furthermore, with the rapid growth in the processing speed and memory capacity of computers, various algorithms can be used to solve increasingly complex instances of VRPs. In this study, we analyzed recent literature published between 2019 and August of 2021 using a taxonomic framework. We reviewed recent research according to models and solutions, and divided models into three categories of customer-related, vehicle-related, and depot-related models. We classified solution algorithms into exact, heuristic, and meta-heuristic algorithms. The main contribution of our study is a classification table that is available online as Appendix A. This classification table should enable future researchers to find relevant literature easily and provide readers with recent trends and solution methodologies in the field of VRPs and some well-known variants.

Keywords

• vehicle routing problem
• taxonomy
• literature review
• exact methods
• heuristics
• meta-heuristics