Heuristics for Vehicle Routing Problem: A Survey and Recent Advances
This is an incremental survey paper that synthesizes and classifies existing methods for researchers and practitioners in optimization, offering a framework and insights into state-of-the-art approaches.
The authors surveyed existing heuristics for the vehicle routing problem, focusing on recent advances, methodologies, and applications, without presenting new experimental results or specific numerical improvements.
Vehicle routing is a well-known optimization research topic with significant practical importance. Among different approaches to solving vehicle routing, heuristics can produce a satisfactory solution at a reasonable computational cost. Consequently, much effort has been made in the past decades to develop vehicle routing heuristics. In this article, we systematically survey the existing vehicle routing heuristics, particularly on works carried out in recent years. A classification of vehicle routing heuristics is presented, followed by a review of their methodologies, recent developments, and applications. Moreover, we present a general framework of state-of-the-art methods and provide insights into their success. Finally, three emerging research topics with notable works and future directions are discussed.