A review of approaches to modeling applied vehicle routing problems
This is an incremental review paper that addresses the modeling challenges in VRP for researchers and practitioners in optimization algorithms.
The paper reviews approaches for modeling vehicle routing problems (VRP), focusing on describing domain entities, valid planning decisions, and preferences between plans, and discusses future research avenues based on a comparison using formulated evaluation criteria.
Due to the practical importance of vehicle routing problems (VRP), there exists an ever-growing body of research in algorithms and (meta)heuristics for solving such problems. However, the diversity of VRP domains creates the separate problem of modeling such problems -- describing the domain entities (and, in particular, the planning decisions), the set of valid planning decisions, and the preferences between different plans. In this paper, we review the approaches for modeling vehicle routing problems. To make the comparison more straightforward, we formulate several criteria for evaluating modeling methods reflecting the practical requirements of the development of optimization algorithms for such problems. Finally, as a result of this comparison, we discuss several future research avenues in the field of modeling VRP domains.