There has been a paradigm-shift in urban logistic services in the last years; demand for real-time, instant mobility and delivery services grows. This poses new challenges to logistic service providers as the underlying stochastic dynamic vehicle routing problems (SDVRPs) require anticipatory real-time routing actions. Searching the combinatorial action space for efficient routing actions is by itself a complex task of mixed-integer programming (MIP) well-known by the operations research community. This complexity is now multiplied by the challenge of evaluating such actions with respect to their effectiveness given future dynamism and uncertainty, a potentially ideal case for reinforcement learning (RL) well-known by the computer science community. For solving SDVRPs, joint work of both communities is needed, but as we show, essentially non-existing. Both communities focus on their individual strengths leaving potential for improvement. Our survey paper highlights this potential in research originating from both communities. We point out current obstacles in SDVRPs and guide towards joint approaches to overcome them.

The defining characteristic the SDVRP, where vehicle capacity and customer demands of the SDVRP that distinguishes it from the classical are not required to be integer numbers, the number of vehicles vehicle routing problem (VRP) is that each customer is not limited to the minimum possible number, and can be served by more than one vehicle. Obviously, when the customer demands may exceed the vehicle capacity. The the demand of a customer is lager than the vehicle capacity, main contributions are threefold. First, we find a novel way it has to be split and the customer has to be visited more to represent the solutions of the SDVRP, which is the combination than once. As shown by (Dror and Trudeau 1989), when all of a set of vehicle routes and a forest. Second, based customer demands are less than or equal to the vehicle capacity, on this solution representation, we propose three classes of split delivery can also lead to substantial cost savings.