Forty years of periodic vehicle routing

The periodic vehicle routing problem (PVRP) first appeared in 1974 in a paper about garbage collection (Beltrami and Bodin, Networks 4 (1974), 65–74). The wide applicability and versatility of the problem has led to a vast body of literature addressing both novel applications and solution methods. This article discusses the wide array of circumstances and settings in which the PVRP has been applied and describes the development of solution methods, both exact and heuristic, for the PVRP. As with many core research problems, many variants have been proposed. We will describe additional problem variants and extensions, as well as discuss the future of research for the PVRP.