The vehicle routing problem in the last decade: variants, taxonomy and metaheuristics

Vehicle routing problem is a NP-hard problem and a combinatorial optimization problem; it appeared first time in 1959 in the paper of the mathematician Dantzig. The goal of VRP is to locate the optimal routes of some vehicles that begin from a depot and serve each customer one time and then return to the depot (i.e., Starting point). From its beginning, the research literature in this area is growing rapidly and causing the extension of VRP to many variants for making it a real-world problem. For solving it, the researchers have tried firstly the exact methods then the heuristics and lastly the metaheuristics. This paper aims for many targets for instance: (i) discovering the evolution of VRP and its variants over the last decade; (ii) knowing the trends, challenges and opportunities in the next years in this fields by discovering, comparing many recent reviews and papers related either to VRP or to metaheuristics for exploiting these results and building on them in other papers.