Recent Advances in Integrating Demand Management and Vehicle Routing: Conceptual Framework, Methodological Review, and Research Opportunities

Abstract

In logistics and mobility services, new business models such as “attended home delivery”, “same-day delivery”, and “mobility-on-demand” have been successfully established over the last decade. They have in common that customers order online, while the service itself is provided offline. To make such online-to-offline services profitable, the efficient operation of a vehicle fleet is an essential prerequisite. Therefore, researchers began to explore approaches for integrating demand management and vehicle routing to support such operations, and a rapidly growing body of literature emerged. However, due to the diversity of business models and applied methods, the analysis and comparison of solution approaches are challenging, especially across applications, which makes the search for appropriate methods with respect to new problem settings non-trivial. Therefore, in this survey, we structure this innovative research area and review the existing literature from a methodological perspective. In particular, we present a holistic problem description and propose a framework that divides the overall control problem into four generic subproblems that we have identified as common in the literature. For each subproblem, we derive a classification scheme that allows us to describe and characterize the corresponding solution approaches from the literature in a structured way. Based on the identified subproblems and classification criteria, we also present a tabular overview of the literature that allows researchers to quickly step through combinations of methods that have already been studied. Finally, we comment on the state-of-the-art from a cross-application perspective while discussing future research opportunities.