Vehicle routing: Review of benchmark datasets

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) was formally presented to the scientific literature in 1959 by Dantzig and Ramser (DOI:10.1287/mnsc.6.1.80). Sixty years on, the problem is still heavily researched, with hundreds of papers having been published addressing this problem and the many variants that now exist. Many datasets have been proposed to enable researchers to compare their algorithms using the same problem instances where either the best known solution is known or, in some cases, the optimal solution is known. In this survey paper, we provide a list of Vehicle Routing Problem datasets, categorized to enable researchers to have easy access to the problem(s) that are of interest. We also make some suggestions as to the type of datasets that might be useful in the future in order to provide the scientific community with even more challenging problems, which are suited to the problems that we face today. This paper, as well as providing a list of benchmarks, also provides a checkpoint for the scientific community so that other researchers have an opportunity of comparing the growth of VRP instances that are available.