The Evolution of the Vehicle Routing Problem

Bruce Golden, Ph.D., is the France-Merrick Chair in Management Science in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research interests include vehicle routing, logistics, combinatorial optimization, and networks.  Over the past 47 years, Dr. Golden has made numerous and substantial contributions to the field of vehicle routing and logistics.  In recognition of this, he was selected as the second Verolog Fellow, named an INFORMS Fellow in 2004, awarded the George E. Kimball Medal in 2018, and received of the 2019 Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award in Transportation Science.  In parallel with his academic contributions to the field of vehicle routing, he founded a company with several colleagues in 1980 in order to implement the latest advances in vehicle routing and business logistics.  By the late 1980s, this company (RouteSmart Technologies, Inc.) specialized in the design and licensing of vehicle routing software. He and his partners successfully grew the company and sold it in late 1998. The surviving company continues to thrive.  Today, RouteSmart is the dominant routing solution in the Postal/Parcel, Utilities, Public Works, and Newspaper markets where routes can range from a couple of hundred to thousands of stops. Edward Wasil, Ph.D., holds the UPS Professorship in the Kogod School of Business at American University.  He is a well-known scholar in the areas of network optimization and applications of decision-aiding methods.  He has published more than 100 technical articles in a wide variety of academic outlets including Operations Research, Production and Operations Management, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and the INFORMS Journal on Computing.  Dr. Wasil received the INFORMS Computing Society Prize for research excellence in the interface between operations research and computer science (awarded with four co-authors).  From 1992 to 2014, he was the Feature Article Editor of the INFORMS Journal on Computing.  In 2002, 2005, 2014, 2017, and 2021, Professor Wasil received the Kogod Graduate Business Association Award for Distinguished Professor of theYear.  Xingyin Wang, PhD. is a Lead Data Scientist at Workforce Optimizer, a company that specializes in software solutions to workforce scheduling problems.  His research interests are in labor demand forecasting and AI methods for scheduling.  He obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016 and B.Sc. (Honors) in Quantitative Finance from the National University of Singapore in 2011.  His Ph.D. thesis focused on vehicle routing problems that minimize the makespan.  Prior to joining industry, Dr. Wang had been working at the Singapore University of Technology and Design where he applied both exact and heuristic approaches to solve problems in vehicle routing and aviation.  He has published over 10 research articles in scientific journals and co-authored three book chapters.  In 2014, his team was among the finalists of the VeRoLog (Vehicle Routing and Logistics) Challenge.  In 2017, his paper “The Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones: Several Worst-case Results” received an Honorable Mention in the Optimization Letters Best Paper Award. 

Introduction.- Overall Contributions of Survey Articles.- Observations and Trends.- Conclusions.- References.