Vehicle routing with backhauls: Review and research perspectives

Abstract In the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB), the customer set is partitioned into linehaul customers who require deliveries, and backhaul customers who require pickups. Both the linehaul customers and the backhaul customers must be visited contiguously, and all routes must contain at least one linehaul customer. All deliveries have to be loaded at the depot, and all pickups up have to be transported to the depot. This survey paper aims to comprehensively review the existing literature on VRPBs, including models, exact and heuristic algorithms, variants, industrial applications and case studies, with an emphasis on the recent literature. The paper contains several synthetic tables and proposes a number of promising research directions.