[ARTICLE] This paper surveys vehicle routing problems involving multiple commodities, highlighting that explicit consideration of multiple commodities is sometimes necessary due to their distinct characteristics or to avoid sub-optimal routing plans.

by Claudia Archetti (ESSEC Business School), Wenjuan Gu, Diego Cattaruzza, Maxime Ogier, Frédéric Semet, M. Grazia Speranza

In this paper, we present a survey on vehicle routing problems with multiple commodities. In most routing problems, only one commodity is explicitly considered. This may be due to the fact that, indeed, a single commodity is involved, or multiple commodities are transported, but they are aggregated and modeled as a single commodity, as no specific requirement imposes their explicit consideration. However, there exist cases in which this aggregation is not possible due to the characteristics of the commodities or to the fact that it would lead to sub-optimal routing plans.

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