Parallel Solution Methods for Vehicle Routing Problems

Parallel solution methods contribute to efficiently address large and complex combinatorial optimization problems, vehicle routing problems in particular. Parallel exact and heuristic methods for VRP variants are increasingly being proposed and the pace seem to increase in recent years. “New” strategies have been proposed and many of the best known solutions to classical formulations have been obtained. The paper describes and discusses the main strategies used to parallelize exact and meta-heuristic solution methods for vehicle routing problems. It also provides an up-to-date survey of contributions to this rapidly evolving field and points to a number of promising research directions.