A systematic review of multi-depot vehicle routing problems

Abstract

Multi-Depot Vehicle Routing Problem (MDVRP) is a heuristic optimization problem that capture interest of several researchers' for its applicability to real-life situations. The variant of MDVRP are solved with some certain constraints such as service time, time window, vehicle capacity, travelled distance etc. these makes MDVRP to cover several situations In this, 76 studies related to MDVRP from 2012 to 2022 were systematically reviewed. The studies are review based on their constraints and an application through various fields. The goal of this research is to examine the contemporary state of MDVRP and its applications. To achieve this goal, we formed a comprehensive search process which was employed on high rated scientific journals databases. The search process resulted to numerous important research papers in the research domain which were theoretically reviewed. The research papers found are screened based on the titled, abstract, year of publication and exhaustive reading of full text in order to extract the related information that will address the aim of this study. Finally, the selected studies were categorized based on constraints and real-life applications they tackled. The outcome of our study shows that minimizing travelled distance and service time were the most constraints addressed by the selected studies, transportation network, waste management; distribution problems were the most widely used real-life applications of MDVRP concentrated on.