Dynamic and Stochastic Aspects in Vehicle Routing-A Literature Survey

Vehicle routing is a complex optimization problem with numerous variants related to various forms of transport planning. Particularly in an operational planning situation, the dynamic and stochastic aspects of the problems are important. The research project Dynamic Optimization in Transportation (DOiT) addresses vehicle routing in such a dynamic setting. In this survey, we give an overview of some of the literature on dynamic and stochastic vehicle routing problems that we find to be particularly relevant to our research in this field. The survey covers dynamics and stochastics both in travel times and transport requests. Our focus is on algorithms for real world applications, therefore mainly work concerning local search and other heuristic methods are covered. The main body of the paper describes and evaluates modeling and solution approaches published in recent years.