The vehicle routing problem: State of the art classification and review

Over the past decades, the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) and its variants have grown ever more popular in the academic literature. Yet, the problem characteristics and assumptions vary widely and few literature reviews have made an effort to classify the existing articles accordingly. In this article, we present a taxonomic review of the VRP literature published between 2009 and June 2015. Based on an adapted version of an existing comprehensive taxonomy, we classify 277 articles and analyze the trends in the VRP literature. This classification is the first to categorize the articles to this level of detail. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.