Variants, solution approaches and applications for Vehicle Routing Problems in supply chain: agile framework and comprehensive review

Vehicle routing constitutes a vital aspect of logistics management. The numerous applications of the problem includes, namely, movement of industrial goods along a supply chain, courier services, public transport, urban solid waste collection and mobile caterers. Each problem has its own peculiar restrictions that may pertain to vehicle capacity, collection and/or delivery, asymmetric distances and specific time windows. The advent of computers and networking has increased the challenge in the task of a logistics manager who has to take several decisions in a short span of time. The availability of quick and efficient solutions through algorithms or heuristics embedded in the decision-maker's computer will cut down logistics costs in today's competitive environment. It is in this setting that the current study is undertaken. We seek to understand the state of the art in Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) and the numerous variations of the classical VRP that occur in real life. The emergence of new search methods has influenced much of the VRP literature of the current decade. This paper is devoted to the development of framework and comprehensive review on various variants and solution approaches of VRP.