Vehicle Routing Optimization for Humanitarian Supply Chain: A Systematic Review of Approaches and Solutions

Corona pandemic has revealed that the uncertainty associated with disaster management has rippling effects, resulting in severe human suffering across the globe. The severity and complexity of the relief operations increase the authority’s response time. The Humanitarian Supply Chain (HSC) can be helpful and is one of the critical branches of Operations Research. This paper presents a systematic literature review using PRISMA in the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) for HSC papers published in SCOPUS and Web of Science databases during the last two decades. It aims to classify and review the literature on VRP models in HSC using fifteen different categorizations. This paper extensively describes objective functions and solution methodologies, including heuristics, commercial and exact solvers, uncertainties, resource types, and vehicle types. Several research questions are framed using the PICOS (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Study) tool. Future research directions are accordingly proposed based on objective functions, uncertain approaches, heuristic approaches, vehicle types, resource types, model dimensions, sustainability, and scheduling. The results of this study show that there is still plenty of room for research and development in VRP for HSC.