Synchronization in Vehicle Routing–A Survey of VRPs with Multiple Synchronization Constraints

This paper presents a survey of vehicle routing problems with multiple synchronization constraints. These problems exhibit, in addition to the usual task covering constraints, further synchronization requirements between the vehicles, concerning spatial, temporal, and load aspects. They constitute an emerging field in vehicle routing research and are becoming a ‘hot’ topic. The contribution of the paper is threefold: (i) It presents a classification of different types of synchronization. (ii) It discusses the central issues related to the exact and heuristic solution of such problems. (iii) It comprehensively reviews pertinent literature with respect to applications as well as successful solution approaches, and it identifies promising algorithmic avenues.