Orienteering Problem: A survey of recent variants, solution approaches and applications

• This work extends earlier surveys related to the OP and its variants.
• A chronological summary of recent works related to the classical OP is presented.
• A comprehensive survey of new variants of the Orienteering Problem is presented.
• A number of recent applications and practical extensions of the OP is summarized.
• Benchmark instances and directions of future research are summarized.

The Orienteering Problem (OP) has received a lot of attention in the past few decades. The OP is a routing problem in which the goal is to determine a subset of nodes to visit, and in which order, so that the total collected score is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded. A number of typical variants has been studied, such as the Team OP, the (Team) OP with Time Windows and the Time Dependent OP. Recently, a number of new variants of the OP was introduced, such as the Stochastic OP, the Generalized OP, the Arc OP, the Multi-agent OP, the Clustered OP and others. This paper focuses on a comprehensive and thorough survey of recent variants of the OP, including the proposed solution approaches. Moreover, the OP has been used as a model in many different practical applications. The most recent applications of the OP, such as the Tourist Trip Design Problem and the mobile-crowdsourcing problem are discussed. Finally, we also present some promising topics for future research.