Vehicle routing with backhauls: Review and research perspectives. (March 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Koç, Çağrı; Laporte, Gilbert
• Is Part Of: Computers & operations research. Volume 91(2018)
• Page Start: 79
• Page End: 91
• Publication Date: 2018-03
• Subjects: Vehicle routing -- Backhauls -- Survey -- Research directions; Operations research -- Periodicals; Electronic digital computers -- Periodicals; 004.05
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cor.2017.11.003
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0305-0548

Abstract

Highlights: We present a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the Vehicle Routing Problem with Backhauls (VRPB). We provide a comparative analysis of the performance of the state-of-the-art heuristics for the standard VRPB. We describe several extensions of the VRPB, as well as a number of industrial applications and case studies. We provide some future research directions. 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.