Vehicle routing problem forms an integral part of supply chain management, which plays a significant role for productivity improvement in or
cient and effectivetomers. In this pape
us-
the recent developments in the vehicle routing problem (VRP) and its variants. The literature is classified into exact methods, heuristics approaches, meta-heuristics, and hybrid methods. At the beginning, a complete work- ing mathematical model for the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is given. Under exact me- thods, a descriptive set partitioning formulation for the vehicle routing problem with time windows has been presented. Further, the contributions of different resear- chers under this category have been discussed.