Where machine learning meets smart delivery systems

Abstract The big data revolution is here and now. We are currently observing the explosion of data generated in virtually all fields of science, business, and engineering, including—among others—medical image analysis, satellite imaging, banking, and agriculture. Transportation systems are not an exception here—collecting and analyzing data can help build better (meta)heuristics for solving rich vehicle routing problems (VRPs) using data-driven algorithms. In this chapter, we review the current advances in machine learning-powered approaches applied to solve different variants of VRPs and show how effective data mining can boost the capabilities of existent optimization techniques. Finally, we discuss how machine learning and deep learning in particular are exploited in smart delivery systems.