Is the Vehicle Routing Problem Dead? An Overview Through Bioinspired Perspective and a Prospect of Opportunities

Route planning is a research topic in artificial intelligence of paramount importance for a plethora of applications related to transportation and mobility. Problems related to the discovery of optimal routes have been at the core of hundreds of research studies reported to date in different scientific venues and tier-one journals. In this context, the vehicle routing problem (VRP) is arguably one of the most studied problems in this knowledge stream. Since its inception more than fifty years ago, manifold studies have been developed over decades of intense research efforts, proposing new realistic problem formulations and sophisticated algorithmic methods for its efficient solving. Such a vibrant activity has been propelled by the ever-growing needs and resource availability of the time being, which have spanned new challenging conditions for practical VRP problems. This is the main reason why this field of study, today, grasps more interest from the research community than ever. In this overview, we profoundly review the recent history and current status of the VRP and related variants. First, the important characteristics and variants of this problem are described in detail, followed by a systematic review of recent advances reported in the literature. We place special emphasis on bioinspired optimization algorithms published in the last years. On a closing note, the manuscript rounds up its literature overview with the envisioned status of this research area, exposed in the form of open challenges that still remain insufficiently addressed, and that should thus guide research efforts in the future.