Multi-compartment vehicle routing problems: State-of-the-art, modeling framework and future directions

Among the many extensions of the classical capacitated vehicle routing problem, multi-compartment vehicle routing problems have been studied extensively only in recent years. Vehicles with multiple compartments enable the joint delivery or collection of goods with differing characteristics in separate compartments that would otherwise need separate transportation with single-compartment vehicles. This enables greater flexibility in routing decisions and order assignment to tours. The versatile use of these vehicles is leading to increasing relevance in both research and industry, and consequently in an increasing number of related publications. The available studies, however, consider substantially different problem variants. As no survey on multi-compartment vehicle routing problems is available so far, the identification of common problem features and research opportunities has been difficult. This paper aims at overcoming this difficulty by proposing an extended typology for multi-compartment vehicle routing problems and extensively reviewing the existing literature. Although only few identical problems can be identified, common attributes among similar applications (regarding compartment flexibility, for example) are observed. Suggestions for future research directions are also proposed.