Synchronisation in vehicle routing: classification schema, modelling framework and literature review

The practical relevance and challenging nature of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) have motivated the Operations Research community to consider different practical requirements and problem variants throughout the years. However, businesses still face increasingly specific and complex transportation requirements that need to be tackled, one of them being synchronisation. No literature contextualises synchronisation among other types of problem aspects of the VRP, increasing ambiguity in the nomenclature used by the community. The contributions of this paper originate from a literature review and are threefold. First, new conceptual and classification schemas are proposed to analyse literature and re-organise different interdependencies that arise in routing decisions. Secondly, a modelling framework is presented based on the proposed schemas. Finally, an extensive literature review identifies future research gaps and opportunities in the field of VRPs with synchronisation.