A Survey on the Use of Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation for the Vehicle Routing Problem

Abstract

The application of Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) has gained increasing attention in recent years. This article presents a survey of the past decade, reviewing 45 research papers that apply Agent-Based Models (ABMs) to VRPs. We identify five principal objectives that motivate the use of ABMS in VRPs and classify the models into three categories based on the implementation architecture linking the ABM simulator and the VRP solver. This survey shows that ABMS is mainly used for its ability to effectively represent and simulate the spatiotemporal aspects of VRPs. Several other features of ABMS have not yet been implemented in the computation of vehicle routes.