Classification of vehicle routing problem

Abstract

The vehicle routing problem is a general name for a whole set of problems in which a group of vehicles located in a depot needs to visit all customers with the condition that only one vehicle visits each customer and that all vehicles return to the depot. Vehicle routing problems are a generalization of the traveling salesman problem. The purpose of present survey in the field of vehicle routing problem (VRP) is to classify different well known variants of VRP according to the type of objects with previously defined system performance was applied . These variants include a whole class of problems where a set of routes for a car fleet located in one or more depots should be determined for some geographically distant nodes or customers, at that, the purpose of routing is the optimization of the series of customers requests (number of vehicles, distance traveled, time spent in vehicles or user waiting time).